FAILURE AND REGENERATION IN THE NEW ENGLAND OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT AND MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
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ANDERSON, Donald Robert, 1944- FAILURE AND REGENERATION IN THE NEW ENGLAND OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT AND MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN. The University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1974 Language and Literature, modern
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THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. FAILURE AND REGENERATION IN THE NEW ENGLAND OF
SARAH ORNE JEWETT AND MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
by
Donald Robert Anderson
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
TOE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
19 7 4 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA.
GRADUATE COLLEGE
I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Donald Robert Anderson entitled FAILURE AND REGENERATION IN THE NEW ENGLAND OF
SARAH ORNE JEWETT AND MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
A~Jl Mu Tf 3// //7-/ Dissertation Director Date
After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:''-
OATJLus fray //,/?-?••/
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SI For Linda
iii PREFACE
This dissertation, originally envisioned as a close study of the works of three or four New England writers, quickly evolved into some thing which was forced to confront greater artistic depth and intensity than a local-color survey would have seemed to promise. I had long been puzzled by the difficulties which the United States in general, and New
England in particular, had in handling defeats and failures. I was aware of a predisposition in the New England personality to withdraw into inflexible protective shells after personal set-backs, or after difficul ties on a social scale. During my original sweep across New England regionalism — which included the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose
Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown
— it soon became apparent that two writers in particular, Jewett and
Freeman, had more directly confronted their region's defeatist tendencies than the others. In part through my own experiences as a teacher, I was sensitized to the process of discovery about heritage — in particular of the history of the individual's having been taught to mistrust himself — which Jewett and Freeman underwent in order to achieve a context for what would be strong thematic concerns in their writings. To wy students at
Marist College, who were for me catalytic through their willingness to share doubts and discoveries, I express my deepest thanks.
My appreciation is also extended to Professor Arthur Kay of The
University of Arizona, whose seminar in American regionalism first opened
iv V me to the subtle beauties of The Country of the Pointed Firs, and, as a consequence, to the overall talents of Jewett and Freeman. In much the same way, Professor Cecil Robinson's enthusiasm for the artistry of
Jewett, and his compassion as a teacher of literature, guided me more easily into a full encounter with the spirit of Jewett. To Professors
Albert Gegenheimer, John McElroy, and Alan Burke I am indebted for frank, constructive guidance in the mechanics, structure, logic, and documenta tion techniques which became central to the successful completion of this study. And to Professor Paul Rosenblatt I express sincerest gratitude, for his patience, his firmness, his honesty, and his judgment, as he supervised the halting growth of the dissertation. My research was made easier by the suggestions and cooperation of the library staff of The
University of Arizona, Vassar College, The State University of New York at New Paltz, Yale University, and Marist College. In addition, my work was aided through many moments of indecision by the encouragement and advice of Jeptha Lanning and George Sommer of the Marist College English
Department. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT vii
1. PATTERNS OF FAILURE 1
2. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 25
3. MARY WILKINS FREEMAN 75
4. THE CHALLENGE TO ORTHODOXY 121
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 170
vi ABSTRACT
The New England writings of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman have long been judged to be the end-products of strong nostalgic
yearnings. The general contention about each writer has held that when
Jewett and Freeman were critical of their own age they were primarily
critical of the way in which late nineteenth-century developments had led
to the overthrow of cherished elements of the pre-industrial New England
culture. Critics of Jewett and Freeman have, it would seem, been led to
such appraisals by two factors. First of all, each writer has, with some
justification, been included in the national local-color movement of the
post-Civil War period, a literary school which, while stressing the
contemporary peculiarities of the various regions of the United States,
recalled a simpler, more attractive past. Secondly, characters in the writings of Jewett and Freeman repeatedly resist the present: through
nostalgia, through routines born in the past, through unvarying beliefs,
through loyalty to time-honored institutions, and, sometimes, through
insanity, drunkenness, or suicide. With such a pervasive rejection of
the progress of time within their characters, and with the national fer
ment of retrospective literature of which the two authors seemed a part,
the general attitude about Jewett and Freeman is not all that surprising.
The premise of this dissertation, however, is that Sarah Orne
Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman were not advocating a return to the
past. Quite the contrary: each judged that much of an unsavory present
vii viii world could be traced directly to elements of the New England past. As they grew to understand both the workings of nature and of the New England heritage, Jewett and Freeman saw how the culture's Puritan origins had caused individuals to overlook the concept of regeneration, and how such a long-enduring pattern of oversight helped to intensify the so-called
"New England decline" of the late nineteenth century. Unlike the rest of the nation, rural and small-town New England had scarcely begun by the century's end to recover from the economic and social dislocations caused by the Civil War. New Englanders were submitting to their failures, and to the failures of the region as a whole, in a manner which both writers came to see as historically endemic to the region.
Thus, in the writings of Jewett and Freeman, the nostalgic atti tudes of numerous characters — that is, their holding out against the present by clinging to the past — was not a fixation to be admired, but, rather, a kind of fatality to be overcome. Improvement and change, each writer realized, came not through intractability, but through adapt ability; not through retreat, but through clear-sighted attempts at taking a natural control of one's own destiny and moving forward.
The fiction of Jewett and Freeman, the finest to come out of New
England after that of Hawthorne, moved in two ways to overcome failure and implement regeneration. First, with their considerable realist skills, both writers illustrated how grim those lives were which negated the possibility of change and renewal. They showed persons spiritually, mentally, and emotionally more dead than alive, who did not trust them selves, and were, as a consequence, unable to interact with time, with ideas, with the world around them, or with each other. Moreover, Jewett and Freeman challenged those customs, institutions, and beliefs which helped the individual and the region to adhere mindlessly to the past, and, as a result, to perpetuate failure.
Far from criticizing the way in which the present had supplanted the past, therefore, Jewett and Freeman raised serious doubts in their works about a heritage which had helped create and deepen New England's decline. CHAPTER ONE
PATTERNS OF FAILURE
During the closing years of the nineteenth century, the writers of New England were confronted by a problem which was unique to their region. As had the country as a whole, New England had undergone severe social and economic upheaval as a result of the Civil War;* but unlike the rest of the country, New England had shown little ability to recover from such disruptions. The mid-Atlantic states had produced vigorous new trade and manufacturing centers by 1900. The South, during the same period, talked about rising again, and was beginning to do so. The West and Midwest were filling rapidly, and relatively infant cities like
Chicago, Kansas City and San Francisco were developing frenetically as the national thrust to the Pacific was completed. Chicago survived its great fire, and shortly after the beginning of the new century, San
Francisco would recover from its severe earthquake. Such powers of growth
1. Useful discussions of the causes and scope of the New England decline can be found in Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in Ameri can Experience and Culture (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926); in Vernon L. Parrington, Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930); in James Truslow Adams, "The Historical Background," and H. C. Woodworth, "The Yankee Community in Rural New England," in New England's Prospect: 1933, ed. John K. Wright (New York: American Geographical Society, 1933); in Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer (New York: E. P. Dutton Co., 1940); in Perry Westbrook, Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England, 1870-1900 (Washington, D. C.: The Scarecrow Press, 1951); and in Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914 (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967).
1 2 and renewal were considerably less evident in New England, where the countryside, and to a lesser extent the cities, remained severely dis abled. Rollin Lynde Hartt, in an 1899 article for The Atlantic Monthly, wrote with rancor, horror, and indignation of a Vermont hill town he bitterly called "Sweet Auburn." Hartt spoke of increasing drunkenness, insanity resulting from inbreeding, niggardliness, and inflexibility. He was scornful of a life-style with so few rewards:
Life ought to be cumulative; normally ten times ten are a hundred; old age ought to mean, if it means anything, the best wine at the feast's end; but here it is not so. I pity our hoary patriarchs. I look with tender solicitude upon our sweet-faced aged women. They have fallen on evil times. The hill town is already an anachronism. It confronts an Everlasting No. It cannot maintain itself in opposition to relentless forces of social reconstruction; and consequently, those who hold all neighborly, ancestral, homely things most dear must witness not merely the aesthetic, but also the industrial, moral and social decadence of their beloved Sweet Auburn.2
Hartt added as an afterthought, "They say that living in Sweet Auburn is like hanging — you don't mind it once you get used to it."
Thus those writers who wanted to deal objectively with post- bellum New England — and current literary taste was beginning to call for increasingly realistic portraiture -- had to face a region which showed signs of having given up. Submission, rather than renewal, seemed the regional motivating force. For two writers in particular, New
England's lack of renewal was a strong literary goad. Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman had each grown up studying the natural world
— and each knew that a primary lesson of nature was regeneration. At
2. Rollin Lynde Hartt, "A New England Hill Town," The Atlantic Monthly, 83 (1899), 572. 3
the same time, each had experienced and observed those circumstances
which prevent societal and personal regeneration. The writings of Jewett
and Freeman therefore became in large part an attempt not only to picture
the manifestations of non-renewal in a region, but to suggest how sub
mission to such circumstances had come about, and how it might be
remedied.
Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman both came from well-
established New England families, and an awareness of ancestry was useful
to each in understanding long-enduring New England traits. Jewett, born
in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849, was the daughter of a country doctor
whose forebears included some of the most notable sea-captains of southern
Maine. Freeman, born in 1852 in the industrial town of Randolph,
Massachusetts, traced her American origins to the seventeenth century.
The Jewett family was in many ways part of a local aristocracy, while the
Wilkinses were primarily tradesmen. Nonetheless, the Wilkins* household
during Mary's early years was a prosperous one. She also knew the material
comfort that Sarah Orne Jewett enjoyed throughout her life.
The hardships of Mary Wilkins' early years came primarily from
her Puritan upbringing. Perry Westbrook writes that the "Puritan tradi
tion of rearing children had not so far weakened as to exempt her from a
strict code of behavior. Obedience certainly was inculcated in home and
school and church, as were the virtues of thrift, honesty, temperance,
piety — and whatever else is encompassed in a broad construction of the 4 3 Decalogue." Education for Mary consisted of the rote-memory and recita tive approach of the public schools of her day.
Mary was sensitive to confinement. The regimented moral and educational atmosphere combined with her poor health to provide her with an excessively sheltered atmosphere. Such constrictions, however, led her to seek outlets through the imagination and through nature. Her biographer, Edward Foster, writes, "She was a quiet dreamy child, even a little lazy, yet there was something in her nature which now and then demanded the thrill of swift motion. She ran wildly to feel the sweep of wind against her forehead and the power of freedom and running. She ran until she gasped for breath and her cheeks glowed."4 A spirit* a need to lash out, could not be totally confined in young Mary. The same spirit is seen in her late teens when she spent a year at the Mount Holyoke
Seminary and deplored the school as much as Emily Dickinson had. Freeman recalled the experience later in life in a letter to a former classmate:
"As I remember, I did not behave at all well at Mt. Holyoke, and I am inclined to attribute it to monotony of diet and too strenuous goadings of conscience."^ The element of revolt, a common theme in her writings, was fundamental to Mary as she encountered a world of restrictions.
3. Perry Westbrook, Mary Wilkins Freeman (New Haven: College and University Press, 1967), p. 23.
4. Edward Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (New York: Hendricks House, 1956), p. 12.
5. Foster, p. 31. 5
Sarah Ome Jewett's upbringing and education were less taxing and considerably less regimented than Freeman's. While she was coaxed into sporadic attempts at formal schooling, she recoiled from them. "I ought to study," she wrote to her first editor, Horace E. Scudder, when she was twenty, "which I never did in my life hardly, except reading, and I ought to try harder and perhaps by and by I shall know something I can write really well."^ The most significant influence upon her education can be seen in the dedication to her Country By-Ways: "To T. H. J., My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew; who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways." Somewhat enfeebled by arthritis in her early teens,
Sarah, for her health, rode the countryside in the carriage of
Dr. Theodore Jewett as he tended to the sick of the area. On these excur sions she began to develop her powers of observation, and to accumulate the mental impressions which would be the basis of her life-work.. She wrote in an 1877 letter that "I have always liked my outdoor life best, and in driving with my father, who is a doctor, I have grown more and more fond of the old-fashioned country-folks. I have always known their
7 ways and I like to be with them."
Jewett's adult years were generally comfortable. Her increasingly successful literary career was accompanied by her entry into the higher strata of Boston society and by a good deal of travel. Richard Cary has
6. Sarah Ome Jewett Letters, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1967), p. 18.
7. Letters, pp. 35-36. 6
written that "Although the elements really valuable in her work stem from her sure knowledge of the circumscribed area she was born and grew up in, she felt a definite need for replenishment from external sources. Sub consciously she avoids the thin particularization that marks most local- color writing and bears down on the universal grain that underlies the g veneer." The result, as we shall see, was to be a greater surface ease, a stronger sense of urbanity in Jewett's writings than in Freeman's.
For Mary Wilkins Freeman, adult life brought more difficulties than it did Jewett. When Mary was fifteen, the Wilkinses moved to
Brattleboro, Vermont, to try to revitalize the dwindling family holdings.
By 1876 her father was forced to sell his drygoods business and the family was reduced to a status approaching that of servants in one of the wealthier households of Brattleboro. The situation forcefully brought
Mary into contact with many of the older Puritan attitudes about one's worldly status. "The pride of the Wilkinses," writes Westbrook, "who
9 believed poverty to be punishment for sin, must have been sorely bruised."
The family never totally freed itself from these economic difficulties and Mary developed a sensitivity to financial hardships which was to be incorporated in much of her fiction. Mary also experienced severe emotional disappointment in a way Jewett never did. During much of her early adulthood, Mary nurtured a silent love for Lieutenant Hanson Tyler, a son in the household where the Wilkins family served. Her love was
8. Richard Cary, Sarah Orae Jewett (New Haven- College and University Press, 1962), p. 27.
9. Westbrook, Freeman, p. 28. 7
apparently never returned, and for more than twenty years, Mary held
steadfastly to her unspoken, idealized love of Tyler. Such prolonged and
unfulfilled devotion would find expression in the protracted unfulfillment
experienced by numerous characters she would create.
External circumstances made Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins
Freeman seem to be somewhat different types; and in many ways they were,
as their fiction will indicate. Yet there are strong similarities
between the two. Both were dreamers who felt from an early age the
impingements of regimentation and routine; and both drew from nature the
reinforcement of a shared belief that life should be more spontaneous
than most New Englanders were led to believe. Even the method of compo
sition of both writers reflects their natural impulsiveness. In another
letter to Scudder, Jewett wrote that "Lately I have chosen my words and
revised as well as I know how: though I always write impulsively -- very
fast and without much plan."*^ Freeman, according to Blanche Colton
Williams, was "one of the rare and vanishing craftswomen who progress by • .til inspiration."
Most important to an understanding of the writings of Jewett and
Freeman is a similar tendency toward escapism in each. Both were basi
cally clinging as children and young adults and often seemed desirous of maintaining a child's sheltered relationship to life. As we shall see in
Chapter Two, Jewett often professed the desire to remain a child. The
10. Letters, p. 29.
11. Blanche Colton Williams, Our Short Story Writers (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1926), p. 164. 8 death of her father in 1878 threatened this desire as did no other event in her life. Shortly after Dr. Jewett's death, she wrote, "It is an awful blow to me. I know you will ask God to help me bear it. I don't 12 know how I can live without him." Freeman had been excessively mother- dominated, and the death of Eleanor Wilkins when Mary was 28 left the young writer for some years with a sense of not being fully able to face the world. Foster mentions how even in her later years, Freeman "loved 13 youth and refused to grow old." Not surprisingly, each writer showed a strong predilection for the production of children's literature and each showed an occasional tendency to yearn for the past.
The escapist element in Freeman and Jewett would seem an impedi ment to two writers of an increasingly realistic period. Yet for both the presence of the escapist impulses was fundamental to their examina tion of the New England decline. The recognition of such a tendency in themselves helped them to understand the prevalence of retreat from the present in the region as a whole. They gradually grew to understand how external circumstances can cause stagnation through escapism; and this understanding, combined with the lessons of renewal and growth they had taken from nature, generated the dominant concern of their fiction. Both had learned from an early age to observe the world around them, and their observations wanted to be shared with a region which had lost its clarity of vision.
12. Francis Otto Matthiessen, Sarah Ome Jewett (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1929), pp. 57-58.
13. Foster, p. 13. 9
The literary objectives of Jewett and Freeman were aided by their knowledge of others in New England who had already begun to use fiction as a tool for a more objective examination of the New England personality.
In particular, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke had, in mid- century, begun an examination of the old New England virtues and how, in some cases, such virtues had contracted into debilitating character traits in later New Englanders. Mrs. Stowe, for instance, had expressed in her New England novels a distaste for the Puritan repression of emotions. In The Minister's Wooing (1859), the heroine falls in love with one whom the community judges to be a supposed religious infidel.
When difficulties arise from her trying to accept her love of the man, she 14 struggles to avoid "the suffocating agonies of repression." Mara
Lincoln of The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) also falls in love with a non-believer, a man who recoils from the harshness of Puritan theology just as Stowe herself had.*"' Mara never accepts Moses Pennel's "natural ness," that is, his belief in a religion of human fullness as it is reflected in the fullness of nature. Mara views his spontaneity with
"the deep secluded yearning of repressed nature,but she cannot wed her spiritualism to the man of the earth. Ultimately, as so many later figures in New England literature would do, she finds solace only in death.
14. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing (Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co., 1869), p. 378.
15. See Alice Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 91.
16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr's Island (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862; rpt., Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1895), p. 296. 10 In the writings of both Stowe and Cooke, however, one finds the examinations of the present coupled with a consistent yearning for the past. Stowe spoke longingly of "pre-railroad" days of her region, when communities were well-ordered and self-disciplined. Cooke wrote in a story called "Mrs. Flint's Married Experience" that "However we may sneer
at Puritanism, it had its strong virtues; and its outgrowth was honesty, decency and respect for law. A share of such virtues would be worth much 17 to us now." . Stowe and Cooke saw old New England character traits as inadequate not so much in terms of the old culture, but in terms of their conflicts with the more chaotic, rapidly-changing world of the nineteenth century. Stowe and Cooke brought New England literature to a greater objectivity than it had known before, but their outlook was still primarily conservative. They were unwilling to repudiate the forefathers.
It was for Jewett and Freeman to develop regional realism into a fuller quarrel with the New England past and to present as a continuum of time and heritage the inability of New England to recover from the ongoing hold of the decline. Critics have often overlooked the stem charges the two writers leveled against the past and have too easily grouped Jewett and Freeman with those of the local-color school who softened the present with the rosy afterglow of a better day. Vernon L. Parrington wrote almost a half-century ago that:
The group of fiction writers that arose in the seventies and eighties to chronicle the life of New England, was greatly con cerned with the decay of the old New England world, and with the causes of that decay. As it set down with loving fidelity the
17. Rose Terry Cooke, Somebody's Neighbors (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1881), p. 370. 11
characteristics of an earlier order it could not fail to consider the unloveliness of the new world that was rising on the decay of the old -- the alien industrial towns with their polyglot workers that were flourishing as the native villages and quiet country side declined. New England fiction, therefore, came to embody two main features, chronicle and criticism. It gathered up such picturesque bits of the past as time and change had left, and it questioned with some anxiety the ways of an industrialism that was destroying what it loved.
Parrington included Jewett and Freeman among those caught up by compulsive nostalgia in their writings. More recently, Grant Knight has suggested that Jewett and Freeman had perhaps "attributed too much dignity, too much virtue to their characters, for if Bernard de Voto's surmise about the terrors that haunted many New England homesteads is correct, then these two writers closed their eyes to the darkest shadows of their milieu and romanticized it as freely as George Washington Cable, Thomas Nelson 19 Page and James Lane Allen did theirs." Within the last decade Jay
Martin grouped Jewett and Freeman with Stowe and Cooke as writers with a 20 similar attachment to "the romance of the past."
Such charges of evasion and escapism are unjustified when applied to the major writings of Jewett and Freeman. For both, such tendencies seem the exception rather than the rule. Both found the past to contain parallels to and explanations for New England's nineteenth century problem of submission and non-regeneration. If, for example, one closely examines
18. Parrington, p. 60.
19. Grant C. Knight, The Critical Period in American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), pp. 24-25.
20. Martin, p. 137. 12 a work by each writer set in an unromanticized New England past, one discovers the awareness in Jewett and Freeman that the New Englander has a history of dealing ineffectively with failure and frustration. Jewett's story "In Dark New England Days" and Freeman's play Giles Corey, Yeoman show that the New Englander had long allowed his failures simultaneously to cause and be perpetuated by inflexible responses to his failures.
Moreover, the two works demonstrate that such inflexibility is in direct opposition to regeneration. 21 "In Dark New England Days" is set in an indefinite past. Only rarely does Jewett insert an item to indicate that the action presumably takes place in the colonial period. The mention c? gold coins and slave ships suggests a time considerably before Jewett's. Moreover, the two central figures in the tale devote most of their time to the older house hold arts of spinning and weaving, and their farm is referred to as an
"early example of domestic farming." Aside from these brief items,
Jewett does not attempt to establish a definite time for the action.
"Dark days" becomes a label for the New England past in general.
Jewett's tale dramatizes the attempt by Betsey and Hannah Knowles to come out from under the influence of their stern seafaring father who has just died. The sisters are first presented to the reader on the evening after their father's funeral as they try to begin to adjust them selves, for the first time in their sixty years or more, to not answering to anybody but themselves. Their new freedom is represented by a
21. Collected in Strangers and Wayfarers (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 5 Co., 1890). mysterious chest the captain has left them. The trunk has been a source of mystery throughout their adult years, and the legends and speculations surrounding the contents had grown during those same years to serve as the sisters1 conceptualization of the future. In the chest, legend had it, "was a fabled sum of prize-money, besides the slender earnings of many years; all the sister's hard work and self-sacrifice were there in hard money and a mysterious largess besides. All their lives they had been looking forward to this hour of ownership."
Thus the opening of the trunk is the fulfillment of a life-long mission for the sisters. The gold which they do indeed find inside is viewed by them as the reward of freedom after their dutiful and habitual subjection to the will of their father. And yet after the gold is stolen that night by an unknown intruder, one wonders whether the wealth would really have made that much of a difference to the Knowles sisters — whether, in fact, they were already too bound to the past, to denials and repressions, to encounter the future. The very self-negation which has allowed them to endure hardship in anticipation of later reward becomes, with the loss of that reward, a vehicle of self-torment and eventually torment for others.
The sisters take their neighbor Enoch Holt to court for no
greater reason that his having been less than a friend to the family, and his having a dubious reputation for honesty. Holt is readily acquitted of the robbery charges for lack of evidence, but he suffers under the
weight of public suspicion raised by the vengeful charges of the two women. Moreover, Holt is victimized in later years by the sisters' reaction to the acquittal. The Knowles sisters have been described
during the courtroom proceedings as looking "more stern and grey hour by
hour; their vengeance was not to be satisfied; their accusations had been
listened to and found wanting, but their instructive knowledge counted
for nothing." As a result of a growing need for revenge, Hannah Knowles,
formerly the milder of the two (and whose servitude had been the greater),
lays a curse upon Holt. The accused man has sworn by his right hand that
he had not taken the money, and Hannah, "growing tall and thin like a
white flame growing upward," exclaims, "Curse your right hand, yours and
all your folks* that follow you!"
Th-e sisters return to their old homestead to live out their days
in bitterness through an enlargement of their earlier life of self-denial.
They appear cursed in their own right. At the same time, the curse upon
Holt does come to seem real, and Hannah Knowles1 words come increasingly to appear leagued with a fatedness. Holt's son has his right hand shot off during a gun fight in "the frontier." The right hand of Mrs. Holt is
paralyzed in a carriage accident. And Holt himself loses his right hand
in an accident while building a new house. Jewett never tries to excuse
or apologize for her inclusion of the gothic device. Nor does she belabor
it. She does not try to force the reader to admit there is black magic at work. The Holt family mishaps can be excused as coincidental; however,
their view of themselves cannot. Holt in particular loses faith in him
self in the same way his accusers have. A frustrated man in his earlier
years he is an easy victim of the frustrations of others. The true curse upon Holt is cultural and personal rather than metaphysical. Jewett's story of the Knowles sisters' curse is fundamentally a re-enactment of the Puritan response to failure and frustration in the seventeenth century. Like the early Puritans, the sisters are children of seafarers. They have toiled slavishly, with the utmost self-denial, for ? harsh taskmaster. They have built an unsubstantiated future and the belief in a glorious new world upon a promise convenanted with their father. With the gold ultimately gone, with the promised land suddenly turned into a world where one must finally confront the present, the inhabitants are not ready. As a consequence, a momentary sense of defeat evolves into an enduring sense of failure which proceeds to touch others.
David Minter has written that when the Puritans began to see that their establishment in the New World had not become a transforming model, powers of perception were affected. "Distinctions between human acts of betrayal, divine judgment of betrayal, and human consciousness of both betrayal and judgment lost their sharpness. The Puritans continued of course to be disturbed by acts that rendered their city a defective model and by calamities that disclosed divine displeasure. But what most distressed them was knowledge that, despite careful and ostensibly 22 successful building, they and their fathers had fallen short." In much
22. David L. Minter, The Interpreted Design as a Structural Principle in American Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 57. See also Clarence Faust, "The Decline of Puritanism" in Harry Hayden Clark, ed. Transitions in American Literary History (Durham, N. C. Duke University Press, 1953) for a succinct discussion of what he calls the "terrors of failure" (p. 22). And see Alan Simpson's Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) for his discussion of the frustrations built into the convenantal community concept. 16
the same way as the Knowles sisters perpetuated their failure through the
self-incarceration of their last years, or much the same as Holt's belief
in the curse upon him, the Puritans, through such devices as the jeremiad,
institutionalized their failures. "By decrying their failure, by
condemning their disloyalty, they defined themselves as a dedicated
people. Preaching, hearing and reading jeremiads became tests of loyalty 23 and acts of heroism." Schooled in self-denial, the Puritan further
lacerated himself by steeping himself in his failure. In such a way he
made his failure a controlling abstraction.
At the conclusion of "In Dark New England Days," Jewett does
propose a counter-theme to that of culturally transmitted failure. She
briefly touches upon the potentiality of regeneration. - At the wedding of
Holt's son, two guests note the proceedings with optimism. Susan Downs
and her friend Mrs. Forder remark about how little the bride's enthusiasm is dimmed by the supposed Holt Curse. Mrs. Downs declares, "She likes him with his one hand better than most gals likes them as has a sound
pair." Moreover, as the two women leave the wedding, they are confronted by a moment of exceptional natural beauty:
The friends stopped again -- poor, short-winded bodies --on the crest of the low hill and turned to look at the wide landscape, bewildered by the marvelous beauty and the sudden flood of golden sunset light that poured out of the western sky. They could not remember that they had ever observed the wide view before; it was like a revelation or an outlook towards the celestial country, the sight of their own green farms and the countryside that bounded them. It was a pleasant country indeed, their own New England: their petty thoughts and vain imaginings seemed futile and unrelated to so fair a scene of things (pp. 255-56).
23. Minter, p. 61. 17
The description contrasts with the dark tones of the rest of the tale,
tones produced by repression, thefts, litigation and curses. And Jewett
is careful to have her viewers note that the vision is not celestial, but
that it is their day-to-day world, their farms and fields, which are
suddenly so special looking. In this picture of "their own New England,"
the women are given a message of regeneration if they will take the "wide
view" of what exists now.
Jewett doe not, however, allow this counter-theme of regeneration
to suddenly over-balance the rest of the tale. Instead she describes in
the final lines how against the sunset the "figure of a man who was
crossing the meadow below looked like a malicious black insect. It was
an old man, it was Enoch Holt; time had worn and bent him enough to
satisfy his bitterest foe. The women could see his empty coat-sleeve
flutter as he walked slowly and unexpectedly in that glorious evening
light." Thus Jewett does not try to resolve the conflict between her two
themes. As she viewed her own New England, as sensitive to failure as it had been two hundred years before, the possibility of simple answers seemed tenuous at best.
Freeman's examination of the past in Giles Corey, Yeoman drama tizes how human pettiness can lead to cataclysm. She refuses to give the
Salem witch trials, and the deaths of Giles and Martha Corey, the dignity of being god-induced.
As with Jewett's tale, Giles Corey demonstrates how personal
failure and frustration can be projected into a society as a whole. In
the case of Giles Corey, one girl's disappointment in love leads to the persecutions which undermine Salem with a frightening thoroughness. 18
Ann Hutchins1 malice arises initially against her childhood friend Olive
Corey. Olive has won the love of Paul Bayley, Ann's former sweetheart.
Ann's jealousy is dramatized in the opening scene of the play when she responds to Olive's invitation to visit:
Olive (rising). Well done, Ann. I was but wishing to see you. Sit you down and lay off your cloak. Why, how pale you look, Ann! Are you sick?
Ann. You know best.
Olive. I? Why what mean you, Ann?
Ann. You know what you mean, in spite of your innocent looks. Oh, open your eyes wide at me, if you want to! Perhaps you don't know what makes them bigger and bluer than they used to be.
Olive. Ann!
Ann. Oh, I mean nothing. I am not sick. Something frightened me as I came through the wood.
Olive. Oh, what was it, Ann?
Ann. I know not: something black that hustled quickly by me and raised a cold wind.
Almost immediately, Freeman establishes a link-up between Ann's frustra tions and the specter of witchery. Such a connection remains throughout the drama and reaches its culmination during the trial scene of Act Three.
The primary motivation for Ann's charges is made obvious when she recounts before the magistrate how Olive Corey was supposedly seen in the woods walking with a "black man." "She went in her flowered petticoat," Ann testifies, "and the flowers stood out and smelt like real ones; her ker chief shone like a cobweb in the morning and gold sparks flew out of her hair. Goody Corey fixed her up so with her devilish arts to trap Paul
Bayley." When magistrate Hathorne asks her to explain what she means she corrects herself: "To trap the black man, your worship. I knew not what 19
I said, I was in such torment." The court is all too willing to accept her explanation. The scene is heavy-handed, but nonetheless illustrates the dominant motif of the play: the unwillingness or inability of per sons to understand how pettiness resulting from failure can become a ruling principle.
Giles Corey, in fact, abounds with perceptual error, which gives the action a sense of doom as severe as Enoch Holt's belief in his own
cursedness. Giles and Martha Corey are convicted not only by the miscon strued testimony of Ann Hutchins, but by that of members of the Corey household. The magistrates, for example, misinterpret the testimony of
Phoebe Morse, Corey's orphaned niece, who has alleviated her own little frustrations by sticking pins in a doll she pretends to be her Aunt
Martha. "No, no!" the girl exclaims, as the magistrates examine the pins
in the doll's face. "Those are the pins I stuck in for Aunt Corey." The
magistrates, driven by the atmosphere of persecution, assume that Phoebe
means she has inserted the pins at the direction of her aunt.
The inability of individuals to perceive the truth eventually
leads the imprisoned Giles Corey to laugh when he finds that Paul Bayley's
plea to the governor for Corey's pardon has been ignored. "Why went ye
again to Boston? Know ye not that this whole land is now a bedlam, and
the Governors and the magistrates swell the ravings? Seek ye in Bedlam
for justice of madmen?" Corey explains shortly afterward his decision to 24 remain silent when brought to court: "There be some things in this world folks may not bear, but there be no wickedness they'll stick at when they get started on the way to't. 'Tis death in any case, and what would ye have made me do? Stand before their mad worships and those screeching jades, and plead as though I were before folk of sound mind and under standing? Think ye I would so humble myself for naught?" Corey recognizes that the Salem frenzy (the "wickedness" he calls it) has become wrapped in inevitably, that it is leading individuals down a blind, inflexible path. Corey, in fact, becomes a martyr to this abstracting process. 25 Freeman, according to Perry Westbrook, drew heavily for Giles
Corey upon Charles W. Upham's two-volume study of 1866, Salem Witchcraft.
She must have read with great interest his explanation of the origins and events of 1692. Upham wrote about the effect of social, political, economic and spiritual disruption upon the Puritans of the late 1600*s.
The similarities to the New England of Freeman's day must have seemed striking, particularly Upham's assessment of how the Puritans
n
24. Perry Westbrook explains on pages 136 and 137 of his Freeman how "By English practice at that time, if the prisoner remained 'mute' after being brought before the court three times, he could be sentenced to peine forte et dure: be placed on his back and have successively heavier weights applied to his chest until he consented to plead or died." While Corey is the only man to be pressed to death during the Salem trials, his silence kept his property from being confiscated by the state since he was not a confessed criminal.
25. Westbrook, Freeman, p. 134. Freeman also had a personal interest in the Salem accounts since her earliest American ancestor, Bray Wilkins, was instrumental in having his grandson hanged as a witch. 21
had been agitated by great revolutions. They were surrounded by alarming indications of change, and their ears were constantly assailed by rumors of war. Their minds were startled and con founded by the prevalence of prophecies and forebodings of dark and dismal events. At this most unfortunate moment, and, as it were, to crown the whole and fill up their measure of affliction and terror, it was their universal and sovereign belief, that the Evil One himself was, in a special manner, let loose, and
permitted to descend upon them with unexampled fury.^6
The Puritan society, in scourging itself for its failures, had wakened
itself so badly through those scourgings that most minor changes had come
to seem catastrophic. After four decades of jeremiads, the society seemed cursed; like Enoch Holt, it no longer trusted itself. This inability to believe in oneself, and to instead derive guidance from rigid external patterns of behavior was, as we shall see, a profound
characteristic of the New England decline as well as the days of the
Salem witch trials.
Freeman does, however, offer a counter-thrust to failure in Giles
Corey similar to Jewett's in "In Dark New England Days." She defies all historical accuracy in order to insert a moment of potential regeneration 27 into the somber outcome of the play. In accordance with Corey's wishes,
Olive Corey and Paul Bayley marry on the day her father is pressed to death. On that spring morning Paul and Olive stand in a field not far
26. Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, Vol. 1 (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishers, 1959), pp. 11-12.
27. Freeman changes some details about the Corey family. In her play Corey is pressed to death some two months after the death of his wife Martha, while in actuality Martha was hanged three days after Corey's execution. Olive Corey is supposed to be the daughter of Giles and Martha, while in actuality Giles had no children by Martha, his third wii'fi. See Westbrook, Freeman, p. 139. 22
from where the torturous death is taking place. Olive resents her
marriage and her love on a day of grief and death:
Olive. Why wear I this bridal gear, and my father over yonder on his dreadful death-bed? Why could you not have gone your own way and let me gone mine all the rest of my life in black apparel, a- mourning for my father? That would have beseemed me. This need not have been so; it needed never have been so.
Paul. Never? I tell thee, sweet, as well say to these apple blossoms that they need never be apples, and to that rose-bush against the wall that its buds need not be roses. In faith, we be far set in that course of nature, dear, with the apple buds, when the beginning cannot be without the end. Our own motion be lost, and we be swept along with a current that is mightier than death, whether we would have it so or not.
Paul, who throughout the play has fought against submission to failure,
tries to counter Olive's desire to refine her grief into a ruling abstrac- 28 tion. This attempt to overcome circumstances, through perception about
nature, works much like the vision of the sunset at the conclusion of
Jewett's story. Moreover, as with "In Dark New England Days," Giles Corey
offers no ultimate certainty that the forces of regeneration will be
understood or acted upon. The play ends non-committally as a messenger
arrives to announce that "Giles Corey is dead, and he has not spoken."
The effect of this announcement upon Olive's eventual approach to life is
left to the viewer's conjecture.
Thus, both Jewett and Freeman demonstrate an historical awareness
of failure in New England. More importantly, they show how failure is
perpetuated by an adherence to absolutes which intensify a sense of
28. Olive's desire to enshroud herself eventually manifests it self through Lavinia Mannon's self-incarceration in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, a play whose characters are motivated by a sense of ancestral failure similar to characters in Jewett and Freeman. 23
Failure while purposing to alleviate that failure. As Chapters Two and
Three will show, the oppression of the forces of renewal by such a perpet uation of failure is the dominant characteristic of the New England contemporary to Jewett and Freeman. Individuals of the New England decline protracted their failures and their sense of regional failure through varying kinds of inflexibility, through inalterable vows and routines, and through a glorification of self-denial which kept one from growing out of failure into new beginnings. While talking about "abnormal will" in her preface to the 1899 edition of Pembroke, Freeman quietly criticizes the Puritans for the difficulties of the present. In referring to a will as "abnormal," she writes,
I do not mean unusual in any sense. I am far from any intention of speaking disrespectfully or disloyally of those stanch old soldiers of the faith who landed upon our inhospitable shores and laid the foundation, as on a very rock of spirit, for the New England of today; but I am not sure, in spite of their godliness and their noble adherence, in the face of obstacles, to the dic tates of their consciences, that their wills were not developed past the reasonable limits of nature. What wonder is it that their descendants inherit this peculiarity, though they may develop it for much less worthy and more trivial causes than the exiling of themselves for a question of faith, even the carrying out of personal and petty aims and quarrels.29
Freeman damns with faint praise, but is unmistakable in her criticism of this ancestral inheritance. As a result of this heritage of failure,
Jewett and Freeman, as Chapter Four will demonstrate, felt it was not enough to simply portray the decline and its lack of renewal. They were impelled also to examine the institutionalizing process itself through a
29. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], "Introduction" to Pembroke, ed. Perry D. Westbrook (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1971), p. 33. 24 criticism of specific institutions. In order to free a region and its inhabitants from the past, each writer challenged a world predominantly regulated by artificial constructs rather than by fundamental lessons of nature. CHAPTER TWO
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
Sarah Orne Jewett's challenge to the past in the face of the
post-Civil War decline has been little understood by critics. While her
reputation in this century has grown to exceed that of her contemporary,
Mary Wilkins Freeman, she has been more frequently misjudged by critics
than has Freeman. From her own day to the present, Jewett has been pic
tured as a most reluctant realist who longed for the past.* Recently,
Richard Cary has attempted to amend this view about Jewett. He has
1. See, for example, Brooks, p. 348, who speaks of how Jewett "felt she belonged to an age that was passing; Westbrook, in Acres of Flint asserts that in Jewett, as well as Willa Cather, "we find the fullest and most closely reasoned case for the American past," pp. 84-85. On page 12 of her Sarah Orne Jewett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), Margaret Farrand Thorp tells of how Jewett wanted to record the "old ways" as "standards." Martin, p. 144, writes of Jewett's looking toward "the coherent world of the past." Charges of avoidance go as far back as Charles Miner Thompson's "The Art of Miss Jewett," Atlantic Monthly, 94 (1904), 497, where he speaks of her "idyllic picture" of rural life. A review by M. S. De Wolfe Howe, Atlantic Monthly, 104 (1909), 280, said "It was the best aspect of New England character and tradition on which her vision steadily dwelt." Parrington, p. 63, spoke of her "Brahmin temperament" which chose to see the idyllic rather than the grotesque." Other similar appraisals include F. L. Pattee, A History of American Literature Since 1870 (New York: The Century Co., 1915), p. 233; Matthiessen, p. 149; Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1935), p. 56; and I. H. Herron, The Small Town in American Literature (Durham, N. C.: The Duke University Press, 1939), p. 88.
25 26
contended that "one must reject the glib attribution of idyllic to Miss
Jewett's re-created world. That this impression persists is due as much
to the reader's desire for escape as to the author's preference for 2 repose." Cary's contention is useful, but does not go far enough.
Cary, like those preceding him, is inclined to overlook Jewett's
portrayal of harmful and long-enduring New England traits, in particular
the tendency of failure or disappointment to overpower the forces of
regeneration. Such a broad-based misconception about Jewett may have
arisen among readers and critics who mistook narrative technique for
thematic escapism. Her prose, as Cary suggests, often seems idyllic.
She is a master of nature description. Yet even in the middle of Jewett's
idylls one can find doubts and ironies. For example, in "River Driftwood"
from Country By-Ways, she turned a bit of nature painting into an exami nation of society versus the individual. In describing the Piscataqua
River which flowed past her South Berwick, she wrote:
When the tide goes out, the narrow reaches of the river become rapids, where a rushing stream fights with the ledges and loose rocks, and where one needs a good deal of skill to guide a boat down safely. Where the river is wide, at low tide one can only see the mud flats and broad stretches of green marsh grass. But when the tide is in it is a noble and dignified stream. There are no rapids and only a slow current, where the river from among the inland mountains flows along, finding its way to the sea, which has come part way to welcome the company of springs and brooks that have answered to its call. A thousand men band themselves together, and they are one regiment; a thousand little streams flow together, and are one river; but one fancies that
2. Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 32. In the same volume, however, Cary joins the main-stream of Jewett criticism by speaking of how "an unquenchable urge for things-as-they-were, for the old golden days of simplicity and serenity, informs the great bulk of her works," p. 30. 27
they do not lose themselves altogether; while the individuality of a river must come mainly from the different characters of its tributaries. The shape of its shores and the quality of the soil it passes over determine certain things about it, but the life of it is something by itself, as the life of man is separate from the circumstances in which he is placed (pp. 1-2).
The description is a kindly one. The author tries to give the river a
majesty worthy of the old friend that it is. She gives it a life of its
own, separate from "circumstances"; and yet circumstances dominate the
description. The tributaries ultimately have only a fancied individualism
as they join the march to the sea, and their regimentation is, as we have
seen, a situation disliked by Jewett personally. The river, despite the
"intrinsic life," is very much the end-product of things it does not
control: tides, rocks, shorelines, the general terrain. The lives of
rivers and men may be theoretically separate from circumstances, yet circumstances prevail. The sketch proceeds to bear this out as Jewett
tells of the decline of South Berwick from its more prosperous days a
century before. She speaks of those who fall victim to circumstance,
particularly one woman who, like the Knowles sisters, never receives an
expected inheritance and spends her life in a crumbling, ghostly house.
Jewett's writing will approximate "River Driftwood" a number of
times; that is, scenes of beauty will be interlaced with, or will lead
into, the circumstances which mar the beauty of life. Such a technique
should not be seen as counter to Jewett's purposes as a recorder of the
decline. Jewett, aided by the sense of perspective she developed as a
child, was aware that the constantly present beauty of life was often,
because "circumstances," ignored or masked. Jewett's style, therefore, 28
reflects her perception of how the harshest of human situations rest
within the smoother workings of nature -- if one could but look.
Jewett may also have prepared the way for misinterpretation through her frequent use of narrative personae who come from other areas or life-styles to view rural and small-town Maine. As a consequence,
Jewett's writings often have a greater feeling of detachment than do those of Freeman. Moreover, Jewett's narrators are often impelled by nostalgia; they are escapists. They come to Maine to seek the remnants of what they feel was a better age. Such narrators temporarily try to
leave the frantic pace of modern industrial society for the slower, more
orderly routines of coastal society.
The use of the external narrator does approximate the relationship of Jewett to her subject matter. In many ways, she was an outsider to those persons she most often wrote about. She was the Brahmin, the
aristocrat; they were the tradespeople, the farmers, the fishermen. She knew the comforts of wealth; they knew the threat of poverty. She felt
an affinity to French and Norman stock, they to the Anglo-Saxon. She knew Boston and New York society and the cities of Europe: they knew primarily their circumscribed coastal world and what they read in books and newspapers. She was of Anglican religious background; they were of
Puritan stock.
To say, however, that Jewett's background kept her from con fronting the harsh realities of her rustics, or that she used her charac
ters to maintain contact with a brighter past, is inaccurate. Willis
Wager writes that "There is about Miss Jewett's writing a strange 29 resonance which, if one is unable or unwilling to perceive it, one can
3 dismiss as merely genial." The Jewett resonance is resonance of dis covery, of discoveries made possible, one would assume, through the wider perspectives her background provided for her. She was able to see the relationship between past and present in a way that her country-folk were not. She could see how failure affected her rustics, while they were only able to act their failures out.
Deephaven (1877) was Jewett's first book-length publication, and on first impressions contains much to suggest it was the product of nostalgic impulses. The title itself suggests an enticing locale, a comforting place of retreat. Jewett recounts in her Preface to the 1893 edition how
In those days, if one had just passed her twentieth year, it was easy to be much disturbed by the sad discovery that certain phases of provincial life were fast waning in New England. Small and old-fashioned towns, of which Deephaven may, by the reader's courtesy, stand as a type, were no longer almost self- subsistent, as in earlier times; and while it was impossible to estimate the value of that wider life that was flowing in from the great springs, many a mournful villager felt the anxiety that came with these years of change. Tradition and time-honored custom were to be swept away together by the irresistable current.*
In Deephaven itself we hear of how "There is something immensely respec table about the gentlewomen of the old school. They ignore all bustle and flashiness, and the conceit of the younger people, who act as if at last it had been time for them to appear and manage this world as it
3. Willis Wager, American Literature: A World View (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 160.
4. The Preface is included in Deephaven and Other Stories, ed. Richard Cary (New Haven: College and University Press, 1962), p. 32. 30 ought to have been managed before. Their position in modern society is
much like that of the King's chapel in its busy street in Boston."^
Helen Denis, the narrator, announces after her first church service in
Deephaven that it "was all so delightfully old-fashioned" (p. 75).
A number of times in Deephaven nostalgia takes the form of adults trying to return to a child's world. Kate Lancaster, the narrator's
companion, tells her:
The town is a quaint old place which has seen better days. There are high rocks at the shore, and there is a beach, and there are woods inland, and hills, and there is the sea. It might be dull in Deephaven for two young ladies who were fond of gay society and dependent upon excitement, I suppose; but for two little girls who were fond of each other and could play in the boats, and dig and build houses in the sea sand, and gather shells, and carry their dolls wherever they wnet, what could be pleasanter (p. 12)?
Richard Cary has spoken of what he calls Jewett's "regressive desire to remain a child.At the age of forty-eight Jewett was to write "I am 7 always nine years old." The death of her father, already touched upon in
Chapter One, would, according to Louis Auchincloss, be a loss which
5. Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (Boston: James R. Osgood § Co., 1877), p. 44. All references to the text subsequently included in the body of the dissertation are from this edition.
6. Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 19. For another good example of the regression towards childhood see Jewett's early story "The Girl With the Cannon Dresses," Riverside Magazine, 4 (1870), 354-360, and collected recently in The Uncollected Short Stories of Sarah Ome Jewett, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville, Maine: The Colby College Press, 1971), pp. 15-24.
7. Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1911), p. 125. 31 Q "intensified her reluctance to take her place in a world of adults." It may be that Jewett is showing signs of this regressive tendency as she composes the sections of Deephaven during the early seventies.
Matthiessen wrote that "All the things she loved in childhood, all the facts of life she had observed, now seemed to fuse and recombine in this
q village of her fancy. Deephaven. She could see it shining plain." And yet, as one examines Deephaven further, one finds such regressiveness ceasing to be a joyous game. Jewett instead wrestles with the tendency to retreat, and shows through the progression of Helen Denis1 encounters with the Deephaveners, that the apparent charm of the villagers is really a mask for stagnation. Helen finds, despite an attempt to avoid all unpleasantness, that, past and present, Deephaveners have been unable to meet failures except through retreats of their own.
Kate Lancaster, as we have begun to see, reinforces Helen's desire for an escapist journey. Helen describes Kate as being "so childlike, without being childish; and I do not tell you that she is faultless, but when she makes mistakes she is sorrier and more ready to hopefully try again than any girl I know. Perhaps you would like to know something about us, but I am not writing Kate's biography and my own, only telling you of one summer which we spent together. Sometimes in Deephaven we were between six and seven years old" (p. 42). Kate is seemingly the
8. Louis Auchincloss, "Sarah Orne Jewett," Pioneers and Care takers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), p. 10.
9. Matthiessen, p. 48. perfect companion for a regressive excursion. And yet, adds the narrator,
"at other times we felt irreparably grown-up, and as if we carried a crushing weight of care and duty." The afterthough strikes an important note. In fact the passage as whole tells much about the cross-currents which move through Deephaven. For the two girls, an unforeseen interplay between retreat and confrontation is more than they, like those they observe, seem willing to endure.
This discord between escape and recognition is sounded early and clearly during the girls' experiences with the old Brandon house. Their residence for the summer, the house has been the life-long home of Kate
Lancaster's recently deceased spinster aunt. One of the first impressions
Helen receives is of the house's rigid formality, which clashes with her quest for childhood: "It was impossible to imagine any children in the old place; everything was for grown people; even the stair railing was too high to slide down on. The chairs looked as they had been put, at the furnishing of the house, in their places, and there they were meant to remain" (p. 22).
The Brandon house stands like the entombment of a by-gone age.
In describing the upstairs "best chamber," Helen speaks of the "dread" with which the two girls entered the room.
We are neither of us nervous; but there is certainly something dismal about the room .... The color was an unearthly pink and forbidding maroon, with dim white spots, which gave the appearance of having moulded. It made you low-spirited to look long in the mirror; and the great lounge one could not have cheerful associations with, after hearing that Miss Brandon her self did not like it, having seen so many of her relatives lie there dead (pp. 24-25).
In much the same way, the girls are made uncomfortable by the downstairs best parlour. The best parlour is cited throughout New England literature as the room set aside in each respectable Yankee home for the most formal occasions: courting, weddings, and funerals. The remainder of the time the room is closed up, sealed off from the rest of the house. Recalling their summer in the Brandon house, Helen Denis writes, "The best parlour we also rarely used, because all the portraits which had hung there had for some unaccountable reason taken a violent dislike to us, and followed us suspiciously with their eyes. The furniture was stately and very uncomfortable, and there was something about the room which suggested an invisible funeral" (pp. 25-26). The girls are uneasy in the presence of that which is gone, yet which endures. They are uneasy in the very sanctuary of the Brandon heritage, and the two summer visitors begin to have a sense of how the past, which they had sought to lighten the present, can in fact darken it.
The Brandon house, however, does for a time retain a kind of antique-hunter's attractiveness. Katherine Jobes rightly calls Helen
Denis a "collector of specimens.The same might be said for Kate
Lancaster as well. Both girls plunge eagerly into manuscripts, magazines, books, and letters, hoping to draw from them, at least, the essence of a more pleasant day and life-style. But as the girls dabble in the life of old Miss Brandon herself, they come across a disturbing packet of love
10. Katherine Jobes, The Resolution of Solitude: A Study of Four Writers of the New England Decline (Diss.: Yale University, 1961), p. 172. A useful survey of Stowe, Cooke, Jewett, and Freeman. Discusses the depiction by the four writers of solitude as a solution by individuals to a complexity of spiritual, religious and economic demands. 34
letters. The little bundle gives evidence of a never-mentioned attempt
at a deeper relationship which Miss Brandon had undertaken before settling into her spinsterhood. Kate somewhat wistfully describes one
clear memory she has of early visits to her Aunt:
But once in a while when she had been quiet all day and rather sad -- I am ashamed that I used to think she was cross -- she would open the piano and sit there until late, while I used to be enchanted by her memories of dancing-tunes and old psalms and marches and songs. There was one tune which I am sure had a history: there was a sweet wild cadence in it, and she would come back to it again and again, always going through with it in the same measured way (pp. 53-54).
In the packet of letters the girls find the objectification of that "sweet wild" song. "So there was a sailor after all," Helen Denis comments, seizing for the moment on the romance of the situation, "and perhaps he had been lost at sea and she faithfully kept the secret, never mourning outwardly." For the moment old Katherine Brandon transcends her niece's pronouncement that "I always thought her the most matter-of-fact old
lady." Aunt Katherine becomes a kind of celebrity, and the girls relish the idea of probing further beneath the surface of her life. However, their curiosity is dissipated by the packet of saddening memories. "We put the letters outside on a chair to read, but immediately afterwards we carefully replaced them, without untying them. I'm glad we did" (p. 32),
The girls never bother to find out what actually happened to the sailor, and seem glad enough to preserve the romantic notion that he was indeed
lost at sea, true to his love.
In their explorations among the citizens of Deephaven, the two visitors add to their understanding of how ungolden retreats into the past can be. While Helen Denis maintains that "we were singularly 35 persistent in our pursuit of a good time," those good times — those museum trips into the lives of the Deephaveners -- are often accompanied by harsh awakenings. In view of these encounters one grows increasingly to question statements like that of Perry Westbrook, who says that "In
Deephaven, Miss Jewett's nostalgia for the past becomes almost a disease.Quite the contrary: Jewett shows with growing clarity the diseased quality of a Deephaven existence. At first the troubling encounters are minor enough to be seen as charming oddities by two still exuberant visitors. But as the vacation goes on, oddity moves closer to horror.
The touch of uneasiness about their nostalgic expedition first brought about by the Brandon house is intensified only slightly for Kate and Helen through their growing friendship with Mrs. Kew, wife of the lighthouse-keeper. She takes great pleasure in showing the visitors the workings of the lighthouse, and becomes one of their closest companions.
At the same time, Mrs. Kew is described as a "very large, thin, weather- beaten woman" who looked "tired and lonesome" (p. 16). It seems possible, in fact, that Jewett intended her name to suggest "Miss Askew," for she has been deflected out of her true place in life. The girls learn of her longing to be among the hills of Vermont, and of her fear of the ocean
11. Westbrook, Acres, p. 61. Similar views are also expressed by Auchincloss, who calls Deephaven "a graceful vacation letter," p. 7; by Matthiessen who feels Deephaven "was not a bleak place. The dwindling countryside was never bleak for her," p. 48; and by Arthur Hobson Quinn who writes that "Through the eyes of a young girl visitor in Deephaven, she reveals the beauty of a civilization proud even in its decay, and uncompromising with progress," American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York: D. Appleton, Century Company, 1936), p. 324. which surrounds the lighthouse: "I shall always be a real up-country woman if I live here a hundred years. The sea doesn't come natural to me, it kind of worries me, though you won't find a happier woman than I be, 'long shore" (p. 18). The second part of her declaration does not contradict the first. She is no more askew to the "natural" things in life than most Deephaveners.
The girls' discoveries continue with the Widow Jim — Miss Patton.
She is the town's woman of great "faculty," that New England quality reserved for a few, of being able to do nearly everything any human being 12 can be expected to do. Mrs. Patton is the helper in times of sickness and death, and is constantly called upon for her store of home remedies and her firm knowledge of funeral ritual. She anticipates the portrait of Almira Todd in The Country of the Pointed Firs as a person turned to in times of need. And like Mrs. Todd, as we shall see, she is in possession of an old injury. The dent on Mrs. Patton's forehead and the story of her husband's hurling a bottle at her stay more vividly with the two summer people than her many talents.
12. Such figures are particularly common in Harriet Beecher Stowe. Good examples are Katy Scudder in The Minister's Wooing, and Roxy Toothacre in The Pearl of Orr's Island, the book which had such an influence on Jewett. In Jewett, good examples are Aunt Hannah in "An Everyday Girl," Ladies Home Journal, 9 (June, 1892), 5-6; (July), 7-8; (August), 5-6. In Uncollected Stories, pp. 179-201. Also, Mrs. Goodsoe in "The Courting of Sister Wisby" and Mrs. Powder in "Law Lane" -- both from The King of Folly Island. 37
The girls come to know Captain Lane, with his enthralling stories about the world's "mysteries" -- tales of the unexplainable and accounts of extra-sensory perception. But the visitors, after their departure from
Deephaven, also recall the old captain's dread of winter and its reminders of death: "I often think," says Helen Denis, "of Captain Lant in the winter, for he told Kate once that he felt 'master old in winter to what he did in summer"' (p. 96). Another aged seaman named Denny tells a bitter-sweet story about his relationship to a cat. He poignantly exclaims in a rare moment of candidness, "I don't know as I ever had anything like me as much as she did" (p. 108). Late in their stay, Helen and Kate meet crazy Mrs. Bonny, with her houseful of chickens. Her strange communion with nature does little to offset the recollection of a better day which hovers over her.
In all, the inhabitants of Deephaven have little of the idyllic quaintness the girls had hoped to find during their summer's escape into a child's world. Their encounters do little to give Helen and Kate a sense that the Deephaveners are a means of access to a better time. This counterthrust to escapism is culminated by two encounters which force the girls to confront the workings of failure whether they want to or not.
Constant explorers, Kate and Helen discover a family mired in poverty in the back country away from the coast. They find a father discouraged by his struggles against changing economic patterns. His difficulties have caused him to adopt the old Puritan feeling that his misery reflects divine displeasure. "It looks sometimes as if the Lord had forgot us, but my woman she never wants me to say that; she says He ain't, and that we might be worse off, — but I don't know" (p. 207). His children stand by politely, well-scrubbed, but with a tattered look which makes the travelers only too glad they can give the man a dollar for tending their horses.
Sometime later, when the girls return to the same farm, they discover the consequences of the man's feeling of failure. After the mother died of illness, the father has drunk himself to death and the children have been shipped out to various homes. Kate and Helen arrive, in fact, on the day of the father's funeral and suddenly find their questing spirit dampened as it never has been before. Their dislike of funeral things, which they have felt somewhat girlishly in the Brandon house, is now brought face-to-face with an actual death. Their search for the past has brought them up against one who has killed himself because he could not cope with the present.
Predictably, the girls avoid the funeral itself, and avoid an offer to view the man's body. "He looks real natural," they are told by a woman who seemed "like a person whose only aim in life was to get things over with" (p. 211). Instinctively, the two who have come searching for life in a dying town recoil from that which objectifies how diseased the area actually is. They find themselves wondering "how we should have felt if we had gone farther into the room and found the dead man in his coffin, all alone in the house" (p. 216). And Helen Denis admits, in a retrospective moment which demonstrates one of Jewett's finest early uses of imagery, "I think today 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 39 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."
In another unsettling encounter, the girls meet Miss Chauncey, the last vestige of a once thriving family. The old woman continues in her imagination the glories of the past. She mentally puts pictures on the walls as part of her general method of reconstructing an external world long vanished. Miss Chauncey has even obliterated death, and refuses to accept the passing of old friends: "Ah, they say everyone is
'dead,' nowadays. I do not comprehend the silly idea" (p. 233). She sees death as an excuse used for those who no longer come to see her.
She has grown unable to separate life and death, illusion from reality; and through her insanity, the past is kept viable enough to serve as her present and future. "Poor creature!" the narrator exclaims:
... it was ablessed thing that her shattered reason made her unconscious of the change in her fortunes, and incapable of comparing the end of her life with its beginning. To herself she was still Miss Chauncey, a gentlewoman of high family, possessed of unusual worldly advantages. The remembrance of her cruel trials and sorrows had faded from her mind .... the twilight had closed around her gradually, and she was alone in her house, but she did not heed the ruin of it or the absence of her friends. On the morrow, life would go on again (pp. 237-38).
The picture of Miss Chauncey in her empty house echoes the previous one of the dead farmer in his coffin. Like the farmer, Miss Chauncey has been unable to accomodate the present except through a process of 13 self-destruction.
13. Jewett shows that New England does not have a monopoly on such situations, in "The Mistress of Sydenham Plantation" (Strangers and Wayfarers). A woman of the old Southern aristocracy lives in the same cloud of insanity as Miss Chauncey. 40
The girls have found Miss Chauncey in a house they believed
deserted. As they did with Deephaven as a whole, they have sought the
house as something empty of the present, but have found instead a
frightening, aberrant present, unable to free itself of the past. And
while the girls linger until autumn in the little town, they leave it with
the attitude of those thankful that they can leave. Helen Denis writes
of the "bit of compassion in our tenderness for the dear old town which
had so little to amuse it."
A number of Jewett's shorter works deal in a similar way with
attempted journeys into the past. Repeatedly such attempts cause abrupt
awakenings in narrators who would seemingly prefer to doze. Three
sketches from Country By-Ways — "An October Ride," "From a Mournful
Village," and "An Autumn Holiday" — mix idyll with stark realization.
In the first sketch, the building of a fire in the fireplace of a
crumbling house is unable to sustain a traveler's nostalgia and creates
instead a sense of loneliness. While she mourns the passing of the old front yard gardens in the second piece, Jewett comes to reflect upon the harsh role endured by housewives of the past. "An Autumn Holiday"
includes one of Jewett's most bizarre portraits — in this case about a sexual identity crisis. She tells of a man who periodically flees the present to dress up in the clothes of his dead sister.
The two finest short works detailing attempted journeys backward 14 in time are both from The King of Folly Island and Other People (1888):
14. Sarah Orne Jewett, The King of Folly Island and Other People (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1888). All references to both stories, included in the body of the dissertation, are from this edition. 41
the title story and "The Landscape Chamber." Both stories were cited by
Granville Hicks as examples of Jewett's inability to handle tragedy.
Potentially tragic passions, he wrote, "blur out weakly into idiosyn-
cracies" in both.*"* Hicks apparently overlooked a double-layer of tragedy in both stories, although clearly it is not tragedy in the
classical sense. Persons do not fall from high station. On the contrary,
Jewett builds her tragedies around those unable to perceive to what heights of human fullness they might have risen.
In "The Landscape Chamber" the journeying author discovers in an
older house a man and his middle-aged daughter living in apparent poverty
among the suggestions of former wealth. The narrator puzzles over the circumstances behind this "glimpse of a defeated life" until the end of her visit when she discovers that the old man's defeatism is inherited.
The man's final remarks sound like a person anguishing over Original Sin:
We are in bondage. I am a generous-hearted man, yet I can never follow my own impulses. I longed to give what I had with a lavish hand, when I was younger, but some power restrained me. I have grown old while I tried to fight it down. We are all in prison while we are left in this world, — that is the truth; in prison for another man's sin .... If there were an ancestor of mine, as I have been taught, who sold his soul for wealth, the awful price was this, that he lost the power of using it. He was greedy for gain, and now we cannot part with what we have, even for common comfort. His children and his children's children have suffered for his fault, (p. 112)
Whether the story of the greedy ancestor has any basis in fact is of
little consequence at the time of the old man's telling it. The man has been taught that it was so, and has consequently rejected his own impulses. He is cursed, in the way Enoch Holt and New England itself
15. Hicks, p. 104. 42 were cursed, through the belief that failure moves from generation to gener ation. He is simply left to murmur, like so many of those in the decline,
"Forget us, if you can; we are of those who have no hope in a world of fate."1*'
As with so many Jewett stories, the narrator of "The Landscape
Chamber" becomes enmeshed in the situation she writes about. She is, we are told at the outset of the tale, tired of conventions. Therefore, she is in search of something different: "I was tired of ordinary journeys, which involved either the loneliness and discomfort of fashionable hotels, or the responsibilities of a guest in busy houses. One is always doing the same things over and over; I now promised myself that I would go in search of new people and new scenes until I was again ready to turn with delight to my familiar occupations" (p. 81).
The narrator's search for something new, however, soon turns into a search for the past, much in the manner of Helen Denis. When her horse lames slightly the traveler is comforted by sighting the chimneys of an older house: "These chimneys were most reassuring; being high and square, they evidently belonged to a comfortable house of the last century, and my spirits rose again" (p. 85). Later, after she has somewhat uneasily entered the house, and discovered it is not so comfortable, she is again teased by the past: "As I passed the wide-open door of the closet, I was tempted to look in by the faint ancient odor of plum cakes and Madiera wine which escaped." Once again her expectations
16. The portrait of a man haunted by the past was first used by Jewett in "A Sorrowful Guest" from Old Friends and New (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 5 Co., 1879). A man who thinks he is haunted dies from the fear of a "ghost" which turns out to be alive. 43
are thwarted: "I never saw a barer closet than that, or one that looked hungrier in spite of the lingering hospitality. It gave me," she says,
"a strange feeling as if there were a still subtler link with the past,
and some invisible presence would have me contrast the house's former opulence with its present meagreness" (p. 97). This contrast between expected comforts from the past and disappointment is intensified as the traveller spends her time in a room which preserves much from the house's better days. The room is furnished with "a gloomy-looking curtained bedstead and heavy mahogany furniture of the best old fashion." Yet in the same room, as she tries to nap one afternoon, the narrator sees the old man quietly enter and unlock one of the closet doors with a great air of mystery. He suggests to the visitor one who is checking on some
"concealed treasure." The room seemingly contains that very hoarded wealth the man feels cursed by and he demonstrates before her the way his obsession drives him. Each time, in fact, that the narrator reaches out for the comfort of the past, she is made to feel more uncomfortable.
Through her brief stay at the old house the narrator also comes to some understanding of thwarted human potential, and the transmittal of failure from one to another. In that gloomy bed-chamber she has found a landscape painting which shows the house in its more glorious day a hundred years before: "In astonishing contrast to the present condition, it appeared like a satirical show of the house's possibilities ....
Once a hospitable family had kept open house behind the row of elms, and once the follies of the world and the fashions of brillian, luxurious
life had belonged to this decayed and withering household" (pp. 102-103). 44
The follies of the past have been stripped of their glitter. They have become instead the miserliness of an old man who has put on an inherited set of beliefs in much the same way those before him put on the dictated fashions of the day.
The message of the painting is made more poignant, however, by the old man's daughter. Jewett describes her as "a woman just this side of middle age [who] stood before me, waiting to hear my errand. She had a pathetic look, as if she were forced by circumstances to deny all requests." The daughter enacts a quiet tragedy as she acquiesces in that which is fully obvious to her: "Father means to be kind, but he -- he has a monomania; he inherits it from my grandfather. He fears want, yet seems to have no power to provide against it. We are poor, God knows, yet we have resources; or had them once." She adds later, "I have a horror that this habit of parsimony has rooted itself too deeply in my own life to be shaken off. You will hear mockery enough of us among the farmers"
(p. 108). The daughter cannot bring herself to mock her own father, or her ancestors. She recognizes her situation well enough, but has resigned herself to the inevitability of it, as her father and those before him have also. She has been brought up to defer to a heritage of defeat and can see no way out of her entrapment except to admit her defeats.
The daughter's is a self-imposed determinism, like that of the
Knowles sisters; and, once enacted, such determinism has become as inalterable to the woman as if it were divinely ordained. "I believe we are under some miserable doom. Father will be sure to tell you so, at any rate," she says. "He believes that he fights against it, but I always say that he was cowardly, and accepted it" (p. 105). Her statement 45 is sadly ironic. The daughter has sensed that man creates his own doom, yet she herself has not fought against that fatedness. There is no indication she has ever said anything to her father, or tried to change her situation. Even her perception is doomed by ineffectuality.
The narrator's sense of humanity wells up in the presence of the daughter: "I would try to show some sisterly affection to the fast- aging woman who was enslaved by her father's delusions. I had come out in search of adventure; it would be a difficult task to match my present surroundings." For a moment the narrator becomes a crusader. After talking with the defeated daughter, the visitor appears about ready to take on the "follies of the world" she has seen in the landscape painting. She proceeds on the assumption she can convince the old man that "we can outgrow our worst inheritances."
Ultimately, though, the narrator's crusade is unsuccessful. She comes finally to believe that "In every human heart .... there is such a picture of ideal life, — the high possibilities and successes, the semblance of duties done and of spiritual achievements. It forever measures our incompleteness by its exact likeness to that completeness which we would not fight hard enough to win" (p. 109). Man, she decides, is unable to complete himself. After the old man tells her of the ancestral sin she tries to counter by saying that God intended man to be free. But the man's "gray, strange face looked blindly at me, and I could not speak again. This was the secret of the doom, then" (p. 113). She realizes that man can be wasted by his past, when that past blinds him to the present. 46
The visitor is happy enough to leave at the end of her brief visit, without having accomplished anything:
I looked back again and again, as I rode away. It was a house of shadows and strange moods, and I was glad when I had fairly left it behind me; yet I look forward to seeing it again. I well remember the old man's clutch at the money I offered him, and the kiss and bunch of roses the daughter gave to me. But late that evening I was not sorry to shut myself into my prosaic room at a village hotel, rather than try to sleep again behind the faded figured curtains of the landscape chamber (p. 114).
The narrator's adventure into the past has been defeating; and ironically, like the desolate couple in the decaying house, she returns to her own routines. She turns to the "loneliness and discomfort of fashionable hotels" which she has rejected at the outset of the tale. In view of her own failures, she too settles for the comfort of that "prosaic room," convention.
"The King of Folly Island" complements "The Landscape Chamber" as an assault on nostalgia which anticipates The Country of the Pointed Firs.
As with "The Landscape Chamber," "The King of Folly Island" protrays how a sense of failure leads to the repression of a seemingly innocent victim. Again, a daughter is the submissive slave to her father's mono mania. And once more a viewer from the outside is unsuccessful in an attempt to find comfort in a supposed world of the past.
The outsider who comes to Folly Island is John Frankfort, a
Boston businessman. Like the narrator of the previous story, he seeks to escape from the confinements of routine. In fact, his journey to some of the outermost islands of Maine is essentially a search for a New World, counter to his world of finance: "Somehow life was more interesting if one took it by contraries; he persuaded himself that he had been looking forward to this solitary ramble for many months, but the truth remained
that he had found it provokingly hard to break away from his city office,
his clerks and his accounts" (p. 2). As the story develops, however, it
becomes increasingly clear that Frankfort's search for a New World is in
fact a search for the past. He is encouraged when told while approaching
an island that its inhabitants are "sheep farmers and fishermen -- a real
old-fashioned crowd." As he comes nearer to that island he feels as if
"he had taken a step backward into an earlier age -- these men had the
look of pioneers or of colonists -- yet the countryside showed marks of
long occupancy. He had really got to the outer boundary of civilization"
(pp. 15-16). Such a feeling anticipates what Frankfort will discover
about the past: that it is a well-settled place indeed.
Jewett gives suggestions that Frankfort's search for a New World
is an unconscious re-enactment of the settlement of New England by the
Puritans. Twice he is called a "pilgrim" by the author; and Folly Island,
the final stop on his journey to the edge of civilization, is presented
as a tarnished pilgrim settlement. In describing George Quint, who has
bought the island after a dispute with persons on a larger island, Jewett
notes that "It could not be said that Quint had stood in his lot and
place as a brave man should, unless he had left John's Island as the
Pilgrim Fathers left England, for conscientious scruples and necessary
freedom. How many pilgrims since those have made the same plea for
undeserved liberty!" Quint has left John's Island for what he felt to be
"conscientious scruples" and "necessary freedom." He has sought to flee
a world of oppressive bickering. Yet in doing so, he has given rise to the defiled New World Frankfort discovers. 48
Quint -- the "king" -- has made Folly Island into less than a transforming model. He is, like the Puritans, a man driven by absolutes in his settling of a new land, and in his response to failure. Following his inability to achieve harmony with the John's Islanders, he has made a vow years before never to step on anyone else's territory again: "I ain't stepped foot on any man's land but my own these twenty-six years.
If anybody wants to deal with me, he must come to the water's edge"
(p. 22). Quint undoubtedly derives strength to endure his lonely life from the old inflexible decree. "My vow is my vow," he exclaims with a covenantal fervor. For Jewett, however, the strength of a vow is not enough. She realizes that Quint "has been made weak by some prejudice or superstition. She speaks of him as a man of "pet doctrines and angry ,,17 aversions."
Quint is condemned most particularly by Jewett for involving the lives of others in his absolutism. His wife, now dead, and his ailing daughter have been forced to endure the solitude of Folly Island with
Quint. Frankfort discovers Phebe Quint to be "very plain in her looks, with a hard-worked New England plainness." That it is a New England plainness is significant, for Phebe becomes almost an embodiment of the
New England soul, suffering for the dissatisfactions of her neo-Puritan father. She has grown consumptive on the island, and her physical infirmity has come to suggest her spiritual deprivation:
17. The writings of Freeman and Jewett both contain a number of portraits of persons trapped because they are too proud to alter a vow or feud. In Jewett see, for example, "Fair Day" (Strangers and Wayfarers), "Law Lane," and "The Lost Turkey," Youth's Companion, 76 (November 27, 1902), 609-610 -- in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 378-383. 49
The poor girl coughed now and then with a sad insistence and hollowness. She looked ill already, so narrow-chested and bent- shouldered, while a bright spot of color flickered in her thin cheeks. She had seemed even elderly to Frankfort when he first saw her, but he discovered from something that was said that her age was much less than his own. What a dreary lifetime! he thought, and then reproached himself, for he had never seen a happier smile than poor Phebe gave her father at that moment. CP- 26)
Frankfort finds in Phebe, as the narrator of "The Landscape Chamber" has
found in the daughter, a sincere and natural loyalty to her father.
However, Phebe's love is always set in the context of her deprivation.
For Phebe, amusement comes from watching a funeral procession float across
the water near a distant island, or from a model of a meeting house,
"steeple and all, which Phebe had made from card-board and covered with small shells a winter or two before." The model was, notes Jewett, a
"poor toy." Hie little structure suggests the hollow and punishing
religion shown by Jewett as she brings the Reverend Mr. Dimmick onto
Joanna Todd's Shell-heap Island in The Country of the Pointed Firs. The toy is an appropriate one for a repressed and starving New England soul.
The stay on Folly Island provides Frankfort with a temporary
awakening. A man who successfully rules his own financial "island," he
grows to see much of himself in the person of George Quint. Frankfort has discovered that even at the edges of civilization money is important.
The John's Islanders, he is told, are like the rest of humanity, "an* want money, whether they've got any use for it or not." Even before
Frankfort meets him he hears that Quint "has done a good thing since he bought Folly Island. I hear say King George is gittin' rich." As he grows closer to Phebe. Frankfort realizes the repressiveness of his own 50 world of finance as it confronts the soul of life. On Folly Island he sees a disturbing microcosm of the world of business:
The shining sea, the white sails, gleaming or gray-shadowed, and the dark green of the nearer islands made a brilliant picture, and the younger man was impatient with himself for thinking the armada of small craft a parallel to the financial ventures which were made day after day in city life. What a question of chance it was, after all, for either herring or dollars -- some of these boats were sure to go home disappointed, or worse, at night; but at this point he shrugged his shoulders angrily because he could not forget some still undecided ventures of his own. How degraded a man became who chose to be only a money maker! The zest of the chase for wealth and the power of it suddenly seemed a very trivial and foolish thing to Frankfort, who confessed anew that he had no purpose in making his gains (p. 33).
He perceives that his life-style is as much ruled by inflexible and meaningless absolutism as George Quint's. And while he realizes that
Quint is a tyrant on an island of folly, Frankfort recognizes, as he leaves, that he is returning to his own Folly Island:
His thoughts flew before him to his office, to his clerks and accounts; he thought of his wealth which was buying him nothing, of his friends who were no friends at all, for he had pushed away some who might have been nearer, strangely impatient of familiarity, and on the defense against either mockery, or rivalry. He was the true King of Folly Island, not this work- worn fisherman; he had been a lonelier and more selfish man these many years (p. 43).
Frankfort realizes the need for deeper human relationships than he has allowed himself.
Yet, when Frankfort returns to Boston, he forgets the lesson he has learned from George and Phebe Quint. He lapses into his old routine.
Only when he receives a package from the dying girl which includes the shell meeting-house, and reads her assertion "It seems as if I hadn't been any use in the world," does he once more think about his own life of 51
routinized selfishness. "Had Phebe," asks Jewett, "given him in some
mysterious way a legacy of all her unsatisfied hopes and dreams?" The
author provides no explicit answer to the question. Frankfort puts the
gift into the drawer of his desk, out of sight.
In "The King of Folly Island," therefore, Jewett brought together
past and present. Kenneth Murdock in his discussion of the "Puritan
Legacy," states that as the theological viability of Puritanism declined.
"Too often only the narrowness and intolerance . . . survived."18 Quint,
the pilgrim to Folly Island, has allowed his life to be ruled by a vow
after his failure to get along with others — as the Puritans of the late
seventeenth century had abstracted their failure into narrow paths of
punishing self-atonement. Through the visit of Frankfort, Jewett also
tied this old New England attitude into the Gilded Age. Through Frankfort
she showed how the latter age was an extension of the former. As she did nowhere else in her writing quite so forcefully or explicitly, she made
mammonism the end-product of a pilgrim's dream grown as hollow as Phebe's _ 19 meetmg-nouse.
The encounter between Frankfort and Quint also demonstrates
Jewett's abandonment of what critics have felt to be her usual dichotomy
18. Kenneth B. Murdock, "The Puritan Legacy," in Michael McGiffert, ed., Puritanism and the American Experience (Reading. Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1969). p. 273.
19. For discussion of mammonism as an extension of Puritan attitudes see Irvin G. Wyllie, "God and Mammon," in McGiffert, pp. 198- 210. 52 20 between city and country. Jay Martin writes, "In the persons of
Frankfort and Quint, alienated existence and isolated rural life come together; in the measurement both are found empty. Both men are 21 hollow." Frankfort discovers there is little distinction between the rural past and the urban present. Much has been transmitted from the past that is very much alive in the present. In particular, Frankfort realizes that his life is a failure, but he hides that failure under a routine which now runs him. There is really little reason to assume that
Phebe's final offering to him will have much affect upon the remainder of his life. Like Quint, hs seems to have foolishly cut himself off from the possibility of change and renewal.
Jewett's supreme study in the folly of nostalgia is her acknowl edged masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, published in 1896.
Few other works of Jewett make one so aware that she is in tune with her own literary dictum, stated a decade earlier, that the "discoveries" and 22 "messages" of literature are not concocted, but "write us." The younger view of Helen Denis in Deephaven has matured now. and the
20. The city-country dichotomy has been overplayed in Jewett criticism. What Jewett seems more interested in are people out of their elements, whether rustics in the city or vice-versa. Good examples are "A Financial Failure: The Story of a New England Wooing," Boston Sunday Globe (December 7, 1890), 25 -- in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 158- 167; and "A Born Farmer," McClure's, 17 (1901), 164-171 — in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 336-344.
21. Martin, p. 145.
22. Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, ed. Cary, p. 52. narrator of this culminating work has achieved clearer perspectives about
time, change, death and human potential. Some of the premises in
Deephaven had seemed simplistic. The earlier work had offered no real
examination of the specific causes of situations, and shown no clear
understanding of why persons do not exercise choice. The decay of
Deephaven, the sense of a falling off, was used primarily as a backdrop
for initial, but poignant, discoveries about the past. In The Country of
the Pointed Firs, Jewett achieves a unity between setting and character,
endowing her figures with, as Richard Cary puts it, "distinctly human
personalities and then sublimates them into exemplary myth-figures.
Their experiences are not isolated events happening accidently; they 23 exude connotations of cycle in a pattern of racial recurrence." Like
nature itself, the residents of Dunnet Landing are moved by inexorable
forces; but unlike nature, the characters yield to forces from without,
rather than forces from within.
Nowhere is Jewett's achievement so clearly demonstrated as in her
portrait of Almira Todd. Mrs. Todd is the guiding spirit of the work, a
mother figure to the Dunnet community. Repeatedly Jewect gives Mrs. Todd 24 archetypical qualities. She has "the look of a huge sibyl." She is
an "enchantress" (p. 47). In "The Foreigner" she is described as looking
like an "old prophetess as she sat there with the firelight shining upon
23. Deephaven, ed. Cary, p. 15.
24. Sarah Orne Jewett. The Country of the Pointed Firs (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1896), p. 10. All references to this, the original Dunnet material, to be included in the body of the dissertation, are from this edition (see note 31). 54 25 her strong face." A primacy attaches to Mrs. Todd, a relationship to the behind-the-scenes workings of life. At times she suggests an earth- mother in her intimate relationship to and understanding of natural forces. She says, for example, about the reforestation of a pasture,
"Seems sometimes as if wild Natur' got iealous over a certain spot, and wanted to do just as she'd a mind to. You'll see here; she'll do her own ploughin' an' harrowin' with frost an' wet, an' plant just what she wants and wait for her own crops. Man can't do nothin' with it, try as he may. 26 I tell you those little trees mean business." Through her understanding of nature, Mrs. Todd has developed the instincts of a healer. She tends to the community with the regenerative secrets of her herb garden.
While she is the mothering spirit of Dunnet Landing, Mrs. Todd is, nonetheless, as much a victim of unfulfillment as the community itself. She is afflicted by the past, and in effect sets forth the tone
25. Sarah Orne Jewett, "The Foreigner," in The World of Punnet Landing, ed. David Bonnell Green (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 285. The Country of the Pointed Firs originally included 21 sketches. Two, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, were first included in the 1910 edition, the year after Jewett's death. These were "A Dunnet Shepherdess" and "William's Wedding." both of which sounded the counter-note of regeneration to the original material. "The Queen's Twin," published originally in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899, was collected with "A Dunnet Shepherdess" in The Queen's Twin and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1899). "The Queen's Twin" was added to the 1919 "Visitors" edition. A fourth Dunnet sketch, "The Foreigner," also was originally published in the Atlantic in 1900, and was not collected until Green's edition of the Pointed Firs. All references to these four sketches are from the Green edition.
26. From "The Queen's Twin," Green, p. 307. of affliction which will carry through the work as a whole. In describing
Mrs. Todd's herb garden, the narrator notes a corner where there were
"some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spirits in a small caldron on Mrs. Todd's stove" (p. 4). The garden contains primal healing powers, but those powers are interlaced with sadness and the confinement of ritual. "I do not know what herb of the night it was," comments Mrs. Todd's visitor, "that used sometimes to send out a pene trating odor late in the evening, after the dew had fallen, and the moon was high, and the cool air came up from the sea. Then Mrs. Todd would
feel that she must talk to somebody, and I was only too glad to listen."
During such evenings Almira Todd would recount her unfulfillment in love.
Years before she had had a relationship which was jeopardized by a difference in social conditions -- "she had loved one who was far above her." The failure of that love had been followed by her brief, peaceful, and unfulfilling marriage to Nathan Todd, and her constantly sublimated
feeling that she and the man she really loved never had what they wanted
most.
Mrs. Todd was a victim of the ritualized artificialities of society. Love, the vivifying force of nature, had been sacrificed to custom. Thus, this seemingly robust woman has been forced in part to live in the past, and she has realized there is a portion of her which 56 can never be healed. "I ain't seen him for some years," Mrs. Todd says of her love in an unusual moment of candidness; "he's forgot our feelings,
I expect, but a woman's heart is different; them feelin's come back when you think you've done with 'em, as sure as spring comes back to the year."
Mrs. Todd realizes that rebirth is the pattern of nature, but that her own renewal has been impeded by social custom. Within her busy world of usefulness to others, she is aware that a part of herself has never been put to use, that she has never experienced herself in totality.
The tragic undercurrent in the wounded Mrs. Todd is exquisitely pictured as she and the narrator go to the spot on Green Island where the world's "right pattern" of pennyroyal grows. When Mrs. Todd has shown the room in her mother's house where she was married to Nathan, the visitor has noted that her guide "could not help the touch of regret that would forever come with all her thoughts of happiness." Later, as they walk across the island in their hunt for herbs, Almira Todd once more becomes archetypal:
There was something lonely and solitary about her great determined shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. It is not often given in this world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this country-woman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs (p. 78).
For a moment, Mrs. Todd is the embodiment of a sadness which has been a continuing part of the Western consciousness -- a sadness that comes when potential human completeness is sacrificed to external structures and patterns of action. For a moment Almira Todd is Dido, Thisbe, Heloise,
Ophelia. 57
More immediately, Almira Todd's sense of loss is an embodiment of her community's. The narrator has come from outside to this community struggling for regeneration. Like Helen Denis and Kate Lancaster in
Deephaven -- or like John Frankfort or the narrator of "The Landscape
Chamber" — the visitor to the country of the pointed firs has come primarily to escape the world of the present. At first she seeks out
Dunnet Landing as a locus of stability in a world of flux. She delights in "the few houses which seem to be securely tree-nailed in among the ledges by the landing." She relishes returning to the village after three years to find "the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities." It is little wonder, then, that she becomes disappointed by the "complete lack of seclusion" at Almira Todd's, whose house is constantly beset by the needs of the community. The house offers little escape with suffering constantly at the door. "For various reasons," the visitor explains, "the seclusion and uninterrupted days which had been looked forward to proved to be very rare in this otherwise delightful corner of the world."
Seeking a kind of timelessness in the past, she even grows to resent the writing she has ostensibly come to do, and turns to her manuscript at one moment feeling "like a beseiged miser of time."
During the course of her visit, the narrator, like Helen Denis, is challenged to rise above her attempted escape from time and change.
She learns to interact through her series of encounters with the inhabi tants of the Maine coast. She is driven to a creative fullness she does not find in the empty schoolhouse she has retreated to for her writing.
Perry Westbrook has written that "So enthusiastic is Miss Jewett over the 58 individualism of her friends the fishermen and farmers of Maine, that she frequently mistakes mere oddness, and even insanity, for a commendable 27 self-sufficiency." On the contrary: Jewett mistakes very little. Her narrator, who has tried to return to the past, comes to realize the pathos, the utter failure, of those who are left with little but to live in the past. Little in the visit demonstrates Auchincloss' belief that 28 Jewett felt "Dunnet is a lovely place," full of idyllic rustics.
The visitor's first encounter after meeting Mrs. Todd is with
Captain Littlepage, who invades the schoolhouse one afternoon while the authoress watches a walking funeral. He comes after the sight of the procession has given her an indication of how numbing her seclusion is.
For the first time I began to wish for a companion and for news from the outer world, which had been, half unconsciously, forgotten. Watching the funeral gave one a sort of pain. I began to wonder if I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurxying away at the end of services. Perhaps the Sunday gown I had put on for the occasion was making this disastrous change of feeling, but I now made myself and ray friends remember that I did not really belong to Dunnet Landing (pp. 18-19).
She has begun to realize, it would seem, that her retreat into the past is dehumanizing, that it cuts one off from a normal connection with life and life-processes.
This feeling of devitalization is heightened by Littlepage, the book's primary exponent of a return to the past. When he speaks sadly about the changes that have come over Dunnet Landing, he undoubtedly
27. Westbrook, Acres. p. 69.
28. Auchincloss, p. 16.
I 59 29 reflects the feeling of loss Jewett herself at times exhibited, as she
saw South Berwick and other formerly robust Maine towns declining. For
the old captain, much of the vigor of the sea-faring days has disappeared:
"I see a change for the worse even in our town here; full of loafers now,
small and poor as 't is, who once would have followed the sea, every lazy
soul of 'em." In addition, the old cosmopolitan view of life has passed:
"There's no large-minded way of thinking now: the worst have got to be
best and rule everything; we're all turned upside down and going back
year by year."
However, if there is a regret for a loss of some things that were,
Jewett realizes that one simply can't live in terms of memories. For
Littlepage, the past is a refuge; but his nostalgia has atrophied him,
spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. He moves in a cloud of Quixotic
reveries, suggested even by his physical appearance. "I could not help
thinking," explains the writer, "that, with his queer head and length of
thinness, he was made to hop along the road of life rather than to walk"
(p. 22).
29. A good example is Jewett's historical reminiscence, "The Old Town of Berwick," originally published in New England Magazine, 16 (1894), 585-609, and reprinted recently in 1967 by The Old Berwick Historical Society in pamphlet form. The article is a good example of the conservative tone Jewett could take in much of her special-occasion writings, such as her holiday stories. In her brief history she writes: "We know so little of the ways of the people a hundred or two hundred years ago that it is a pleasure to be able to recall the customs of only fifty years since, and to be able to picture to ourselves, not only the people, but the way they lived in their pleasant houses and spent their time in the same pleasant houses and along the quiet streets that we ourselves know." 60
The past has, in many ways, left Littlepage incapable of coping with the present. He has, Mrs. Todd notes, read too much and lives in a world of imaginative constructs. Most importantly, his bookish dehydra tion (suggested by his last name) comes from that system whose passing he laments. "A captain is not expected to be familiar with his crew," he explains, "and for company's sake in dull days and nights he turns to his book. Most of us old shipmasters came to know 'most everything about something; one would take to readin' on farming topics, and some were great on medicine, — but Lord help their poor crews ..." (p. 28). The old captains were gifted at many things, but human interaction was not one of them. They were isolated from the rest of their ship-board society by convention, by an artificial set of absolutes which drove them into a world of trivia. When Littlepage laments for the past, he is in effect lamenting the passing of that system which has left him incapable of dealing with the present.
Captain Littlepage's mysterious account of ghostly arctic figures is, therefore, a most appropriate one. Years before he had set out on his expedition to Hudson's Bay in a ship whose name, "The Minerva," suggests human wisdon. The vessel, he recalls, was then getting "old and leaky." The journey purportedly, brought the travelers to a land which one of the sailors believed to be "the world next to this." Old Gaffet has described to the Captain the sighting of a town up there where "there was neither living or dead." In all, it "'Twa'n't a right-feeling part of the world." The sighting of the limbo-land between life and death suggests the evolution of Littlepage's mind. He has been made vulnerable to life by too much dealing with imitations rather than realities and by 61 retreating into the past, a world next to this. His is a mind which can quite rightly assert that human beings "have not looked in the right direction"; but his mind, devoid of the wisdom of nature itself, is uncertain of that direction. Littlepage's is a taxidermist brain, like that of the young ornothologist in "The White Heron." The captain seeks to capture life by stuffing it rather than by living it. One is not surprised by Almira Todd's assertion that "funerals always sets him going."
The futility of Littlepage is repeated in two other major instances in The Country of the Pointed Firs. Elijah Tilley is super ficially a member of that breed of mariners lounging around the docks of
Dunnet -- "evasive and uncommunicative persons who are so suspicious of you that they make you almost suspicious of yourself." The visitor finds a great deal to admire about the old sailing men, and she repeatedly tries to fashion them into the network of her own preconceptions: "I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics or theology." The narrator quietly voices her uneasiness about the artifi cial constructs of mankind which, as we shall see in Chapter Four, were counter to renewal.
The narrator's hope that Tilley is indeed free of external controls is disappointed. He is, like Littlepage, a paradox. On the one hand he evokes admiration through the simple "warm and clean" grasp of his hand, or the fidelity of his love for his dead wife. At the same 62 time the visitor sees a pathos in a man who was "an evasive, discouraged-
looking person, heavy-headed, and stooping so that one could never look him in the face" (p. 189). While Tilley is so rugged-looking that death would have to claim him with a "good serviceable harpoon of a seventeenth
century woodcut," he is driven by his wife's death to a renunciation of
life. Not only does Tilley cherish the memory of his wife, he cherishes a perpetual moment constructed out of the past to serve as the present.
Tilley does not hop through life like Littlepage, but he is, as
Almira Todd says, "a ploddin' man." Jewett captures Tilley's failure to recover form his loss when she describes how "The old widower sat with his head bowed over his knitting, as if he were hastily shortening the very thread of life" (p. 197). Even though he has repeatedly confronted nature on the sea, Tilley's heritage has left him incapable of adapting to the profoundest lessons of nature contained in the interplay of life and death. He too has missed the lesson of renewal, and rather than violate his memories of past comforts, he peacefully submits to defeat by the present.
Joanna Todd is the most haunting victim of the heritage of 30 failure to be found in Jewett, or perhaps any New England writer. It would be most inaccurate to say, as one critic has, that Jewett "ignores
30. Other studies of emotional failure in Jewett include "The Quest of Mr. Teaby" 'n Strangers and Wayfarers -- a portrait of timidity about feelings; and the brief, poignant sketch of a woman unable to accept the death of her son in "A Way Station," New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 93 (December 17, 1890), n.p. Christmas Number Supplement (and in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 168-170). 63 31 the dreary, the morbid, the horrible in Joanna's diseased existence."
Her tragedy is enacted in isolation, yet it fully reflects a culture
feeding in the most dreary way upon its own failures.
Joanna has been jilted by the only love of her life. She has been unable to adjust to her loss, and insteady of going on in society, she seeks the isolation of Shell-heap Island. Joanna, we are told, has committed the "Unpardonable Sin," most usefully defined by Paul Elmer
More in connection with Ethan Brand as the "sin of banishing from the 32 breast all those natural, spontaneous emotions in pursuit of an idea."
Joanna has renounced all possibilities of renewal to fiercely pursue self-punishment. She retreats, therefore, to Shell-heap, the island of death about which old legends of cannibalism and human sacrifice survive.
As the result of a single failure, Joanna rejects the possibility of future fullness and, like Tilley, though more starkly, she chooses to run out the thread of her life as soon as possible. "You must give my love to Nathan, — he's a dear good man," Joanna has told Mrs. Todd during the latter's sole visit to Shell-heap; "an' tell your mother, if I should be sick she mustn't wish I could get well, but I want her to be the one to come."
Joanna's quiet but insistent wish for death is intriguing in terms of Mrs. Todd's comment that "In these days the young folks is all
31. Westbrook, Acres, p. 72.
32. Paul Elmer More, "Hawthorne: Looking Before and After," The Shelburne Essays, Second Series (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1907) p. 179. 64 copycats." Joanna, the youth of an earlier generation, seems less a copy-cat. She seems compellingly individualized in her rejection of society. vYet ironically, her action is to a large extent induced culturally. She is a victim of her own heritage, with its stress on self-chastisement in the face of failure. Mrs. Fosdick, the old friend of Mrs. Todd, senses the culpability of her heritage when she says of
Joanna, "Yes, she was one o' them poor things that talked about the great sin; we don't seem to hear about the unpardonable sin now, buy you may say't was not uncommon then" (p. 123). Joanna, like those who copy, is a victim of forces which have moved her against her will.
TTie affect of heritage upon Joanna is shown close up during
Mrs. Todd's visit to Shell-heap. Mrs. Todd, who has known her own loss, suffers deeply in the presence of Joanna's terrible isolation. On the other hand, the Reverend Mr. Dimmick, who has made the -journey with
Mrs. Todd, arrives at and leaves the island with a mind full of abstrac- 33 tions. He offers Joanna little compassion or understanding. "He did offer a prayer," Mrs. Todd recalls bitterly, "but 't was all about hearin1 the voice o' God out o' the whirlwind; and I thought while he was goin' on that anybody that has spent the long cold winter all alone out on Shell-heap Island knew a good deal more about those things than he did.
I was so provoked I opened my eyes and stared straight at him." Dimmick has reinforced the guilt Joanna already feels, and in a few moments has
33. Jewett, as well as Freeman, were both careful in the choice of names for their characters and locales. "Dimmick" is a good example, with its elision of "dim it" and "mimic." both appropriate to his character. 65
demonstrated the non-compassionate metaphysics which helped drive Joanna
to the island. He has also driven Almira Todd, the elemental woman, to
her quaint but significant moment of religious defiance as she unseals
her eyes during prayer. Mrs. Todd recalls the minister's "stupid back"
as he strolled across the island, and concludes her account by picturing
how "He preached next Sabbath, same as usual, somethin' high soundin'
about the creation, and I couldn't help thinkin1 he might never get no
further; he seemed to know no remedies, but he had a great use of words."
Mrs. Todd, with her own garden full of natural remedies, is for the
moment set in clear opposition by Jewett to the religious abstractions
which masqueraded as cure-alls.
The narrator's encounters with Littlepage, Joanna, and Tilley
have darkened her escape from the present. She has found the New England
past to be full of stifling rigidity and self-denial. Instead of
uncovering a society beautifully preserved against the encroachments of
the present, she finds a people laboring under various encroachments of
their own. Jewett concluded the original Dunnet sketches (other parts
were, as we shall see, added later) with a vignette which captures the narrator's overall pattern of discovery. In "A Backward View," describing
the visitor's last days at the Landing, she recounts Mrs. Todd's departure
from their awkward farewell:
Close at hand, Mrs. Todd seemed able and warmhearted and quite absorbed in her bustling industries, but her distant figure looked mateless and appealing, with something about it that was strangely self-possessed and mysterious. Now and then she stooped to pick something, -- it might have been her favorite pennyroyal, -- and at last I lost sight of her as she slowly crossed an open space on one of the higher points of land, and disappeared again behing a dark clump of juniper and the pointed firs (p. 211). 66
The final impression about Mrs. Todd is of her incompleteness. She is
like the past itself: self-sufficient when looked at through the "close
at hand" perspectives of nostalgia; but when viewed with some distance, with some objectivity, the past becomes surrounded by its deficiencies.
For Sarah Orne Jewett, the alternative to a decayed present was not a return to the past, no matter how golden that past might have seemed to some. The answer was rather to infuse that decay with the teachings of nature. In one of her finest nature sketches, "An October
Ride," Jewett wrote,
The world goes on year after year. We can use its forces, and shape and mould them, and perfect this thing or that, but we cannot make new forces; we use only the tools we find to carve the wood we find. There is nothing new: we discover and combine and use. Here is the wild fruit, -- the same fruit at heart as that with which the gardener wins his prize. The world is the same world. You find a diamond, but the diamond was there a thousand years ago; you did not make it by finding it. We grow spiritually, until we grasp some new great truth of God; but it was always true, and waited for us until we came. What is there new and strange in the world except ourselves! Our thoughts are our own; God gives our life to us moment by moment, but He gives it to be our own.
Life, she says, is not prescribed. Life is given to be lived, not to be surrendered to the past or to other external controls. The perpetuation of failure, as we have seen, is one of those controls. It breeds self- denial which, in excess, can make one suicidal. Thus, as we have begun to see in Chapter One, Jewett's writings often strike the counter-theme of renewal as another "great truth" waiting to be discovered.
For example, the two visitors to Deephaven, despite their disenchantments, begin to have some perception of regeneration and its
34. Sarah Orne Jewett, Country By-Ways (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1881), p. 101. 67 origins. From Captain Sands, another of the seafaring believers in the unexplainable, they derive a fuller understanding of instinct. In New
England Saints, Austin Warren discusses the traditional mistrust among
New Englanders of instinctive learning: "Not a very sensuous creature either in life or in art, the New Englander is rarely incited to listen to the dark blood or to indeed imagine that it could teach him anything worth the attention of an honest man. In place of intuition or instinct, 35 he trusts to calculation." Jonathan Edwards had disclaimed that
This suggesting of new truths or doctrines to the mind, indepen dent of any revelations of those propositions, either in word or writing, is inspiration such as the prophets and apostles had, and such as some enthusiasts pretend to. But this spiritual light that I am speaking of, is quite a different thing from inspiration; it reveals no new doctrine, it suggests no new proposition to the mind, it teaches no new thing of God, or Christ or any other world, not taught in the Bible; but only gives a due apprehension of those things that are taught in the word of God."
Jewett challenges this time-honored concept. "I believe old Captain
Sands is right," comments Kate Lancaster in Deephaven, "and we have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we can never frame any laws. We laugh at them, but we are always meeting them, and one cannot help knowing that it has been the same through all history" (p. 185).
Like Mrs. Stowe, whom she greatly admired, Jewett from an early age was attracted to the idea that some kind of extra-sensory force reaches and connects all of life. A few years before Deephaven she noted
35. Austin Warren, New England Saints (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), p. 4.
36. Cited in Clarence Faust, "The Decline of Puritanism," in Harry Hayden Clark, ed., Transitions in American Literary History (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1953), p. 34. 68 in a letter that she had been reading a book on human and animal 37 instincts -- "one of the most interesting things I have ever read."
Deephaven was in part, it would seem, a testing out of this interest. By
1881, in "River Driftwood," she would state her growing convictions more forcefully. Speaking of wildlife, she writes
It is not necessary to tame them before they can be familiar and responsive; we can meet them on their own ground, and be sur prised to find out how much we may have in common. Taming is only forcing them to learn some of our customs; we should be wise if we let them tame us to make use of some of theirs. They share other instincts and emotions with us beside surprise, or suspicion, or fear. They are curiously thoughtful; they act no more from unconscious instinct than we do; at least, they are called upon to decide as many questions of action or direction, and there are many emergencies of life when we are far more helpless and foolish than they (pp. 5-6).
For Jewett, there is nothing disgraceful about being compared to animals.
As she says about the great gulls of the Maine shore, "Perhaps they know something about me that I do not know of myself yet."
Jewett sees instinct as the unifying and vivifying force. When one turns to nature the quiet secrets of renewal wrapped within this force reveal themselves. Beautifully illustrative of this understanding is William Blackett, the taciturn brother of Almira Todd. He is con trasted to his sister as an embodiment of renewable life in The Country of the Pointed Firs.
37. Sarah Ome Jewett Letters, ed. Cary, p. 24. 69
William lives with his mother on Green Island, the very name of
which suggests a kind of eternal spring. On Green Island, unlike Shell- 38 heap Island, one has little sense of the past. William's mother, the
matriarch of the tiny island, is described by the narrator as taking on
"a sudden look of youth; you felt as if she promised a great future, and
was beginning, not ending, her summers and their happy toils" (p. 61).
William also generated a feeling of youthfulness: "He was about sixty,
and not young-looking for his years, yet so undying is the spirit of
youth, and bashfulness has such a power of survival, that I felt all the
time as if one must try to make the occasion easy for some one who was
young and new to the affairs of social life" (p. 69).
How William and his mother have maintained their forward-looking
air of youth is best illustrated during a walk the narrator takes with him on what purports to be a fishing expedition. "If there is one in ay
above another," writes Jewett, "of getting so close to nature than one
simply is a piece of nature, following a primeval instinct with perfect
self-forgetfulness and forgetting everything except the dream conscious ness of pleasant freedom, it is to take the course of a shady trout 39 brook." On this excursion, the narrator learns from William how humans
38. That Green Island and Shell-heap set up an idyll and counter- idyll in the work has been noted by several critics. An important study is Robert Magowan, "The Outer Island Sequence in 'Pointed Firs,'" Colby Library Quarterly, 6 (1964), 418-24. See also Hyatt Waggoner, "The Unity of 'The Country of the Pointed Firs,'" Twentieth Century Literature, 5 (1959), 69-70; Warner Berthoff, "The Art of Jewett's 'Pointed Firs,'" New England Quarterly, 32 (1959), 44-45; and Martin, p. 146.
39. "A Dunnet Shepherdess," Green, p. 221. 70
can communicate silently, instinctively, unburdened by the conventions of
"normal" conversation.
Many times, being used to the company of Mrs. Todd and other friends who were in the habit of talking, I came near to making an idle remark to William, but I was for the most part happily preserved; to be with him only for a short time was to live on a different level, where thoughts served best because they were thoughts in common; the primary effect upon our minds of the simple things and beauties that we saw. Once when I caught a sight of a lovely gay pigeon-woodpecker eyeing us curiously from a dead branch, and instinctively turned toward William, he gave an indulgent, comprehending nod which silenced me all the rest of the way. The wood-road was not a place for common noisy conversation; one would interrupt the birds and all the still little beasts that belonged there. But it was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one's self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.40
For Jewett, persons need not to talk more, but to listen more, to the
quiet message of nature. Mrs. Todd has left Green Island years before to suffer from the noise of convention, noise which often controls persons, but rarely speaks to them.
William's knowledge about the instinctive, invisible movements of nature helps one to understand how he has shared a forty-year love with
Esther Hight, the shepherdess on the mainland who was the real object of his fishing trip. During those years, the love of William and Esther has been repressed by the demands of her invalid mother. However, in two persons intimate with nature, the love has maintained a constant newness.
Neither is defeated by disappointment, but maintains hope for the day when their love can be acted upon. Ultimately, the marriage of William and
Esther, in the material added to The Country of the Pointed Firs, sounds the dominant note of regeneration in Dunnet Landing.
40. "A Dunnet Shepherdess," pp. 230-231. 71
The wedding is anticipated by another celebration in The Country
of the Pointed Firs, but a celebration undercut by the general atmosphere
of failure of the region. The Bowden reunion serves in part to unleash
"the hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature" through the
rediscovery of a communal spirit. Jewett sees the reunion as a continu
ation of primal rites of celebration. "The sky, the sea, have watched
poor humanity at its rites so long; we were no more a New England family
celbrating its own existence and simple progress; we carried the tokens
and inheritence of all such households from which this had descended, and
were only the latest of our line. We possessed the instincts of a far,
forgotten childhood" (p. 163). And yet this celebration of heritage is
coupled with the picture of Santin Bowden, a "poor bloom" which is out of
its own place. Santin is the warrior with no war. Mrs. Todd herself is seen in possession of old grudges, and a pettiness surprising in her.
Many of the Bowdens cause the narrator to muse about human potential and
"the reserve force of society" which restricts it. "More than one face
among the Bowdens showed that only opportunity and stimulus were lacking,
--a narrow set of circumstances had caged a fine able character and held
it captive. One sees exactly the same types in a country gathering as in the most brilliant city company. You are safe to be understood if the spirit of your speech is the same for one neighbor as for the other."
The Bowden reunion was, in part, then, a display of human futility in the
midst of the communality.
The wedding of William and Esther is a less impeded celebration,
even after forty years of impediment. Esther is finally freed from the 72 past with the death of her crippled mother -- "a ramping old mother, stung by the sense of defeat and mourning her lost activities." Clearly the wedding is a progression from the hold of failure to the rebirth of self. The reception at Mrs. Todd's following the wedding even has an effect, if temporary, upon the community as a whole.
When we got into the house, all the repression of Mrs. Todd's usual manner was swept away by her flood of feeling. She took Esther's thin figure, lamb and all, to her heart and held her there, kissing her as she might have kissed a child, and then held out her hand to Willian and they gave each other the kiss of peace. This was so moving, so tender, so free from their usual fetters of self-consciousness, that Esther and I could not help giving each other a happy glance of comprehension. I never saw a young bride half so touching in her happiness as Esther was that day of her wedding. We took the cake and wine of the marriage feast together, and then to my astonishment I found that sympathy and public interest in so great an occasion were going to have their way. I shrank from the thought of William's possible sufferings, but he welcomed both the first group of neighbors and the last with heartiness; and when at last they had gone, for there were thoughtless loiterers in Dunnet Landing. I made ready with eager zeal and walked with William and Esther to the water-side. It was only a little way. and kind faces nodded reassuringly from the windows, while kind voices spoke from the doors. Esther carried the lamb on one arm; she had found time to tell me that its mother had died that morning and she could not bring herself to the thought of leaving it behind. She kept the other hand on William's arm until we reached the landing. Then he shook hands with me, and looked me full in the face to be sure I understood how happy he was, and stepping onto the boat held out his arms to Esther -- at last she was his own.^l
This culminating scene is complete with images suggestive of the Last
Supper and resurrection. And yet one need not look at the scene as a
Christian pageant, for the acts are age-old: the community of the marriage feast and the reverence for life in Esther's guardianship of the lamb. Timeless acts cut through the solitude of those living in the past, and momentarily the very separate lives of the villagers seem to have
41. "William's Wedding," Green, pp. 347-48. 73 been bounded together. The residents of Dunnet Landing seem almost susceptible of renewal themselves as they come into contact with the newly married couple, and share the narrator's observation that "They were going to be young again now, she and William, to forget work and care in the spring weather.
If one is to say, then, that Jewett wished to retreat into the past, one must say it is not the near past, not the New England past, which attracted her. Rather, she was drawn to the primal past, to the prevalence of instinct. She writes in the "William's Wedding" sketch,
"The happiness of life is in its recognitions. It seems that we are not ignorant of these truths, and even that we believe them; but we are so little accustomed to think of them, they are so strange to us . . ." To overcome that strangeness is the central preoccupation of Jewett's writings. The beauty of the primal past is that, unlike a cultural past, it need not be retreated into. Such primacy is present if one would recognize it.
Along with her concern about those who return to an artificial past, however, Jewett also examines elements of the present which make the instinctive recognitions of life strange to so many. As we shall see
42. The regeneration theme appears in a number of other Jewett works, as old patterns are broken and new discoveries made. See "Miss Sidney's Flowers" (Old Friends and New); "A Landless Farmer" (Mate of the Daylight and Friends Ashore -- Boston: Houghton, Mifflin $ Co., 1884); "The Only Rose" and "A Second Spring," both from The Life of Nancy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin £ Co., 1895). An individual's rising above "circumstances" is stressed in "Farmer Finch" (A White Heron — Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1886); in "A Guest at Home," Congregationalist, 34 (November 29, 1882), 399; and "A Dark Carpet," Congregationalist, 35 (July 19, 1883), 246. Both are in The Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 53- 65. 74
in the fourth chapter of this study, Jewett, like Mary Wilkins Freeman,
attacks a number of strongly held orthodoxies in all sectors of human
activity. For Jewett, conventions, institutions, customs, abstractions
could work very much like nostalgia in allowing the dead past to rule the
present. Failure was itself seemingly a regional orthodoxy, and in order
to shake individuals loose from it Jewett would try to pry open the tight hold of orthodoxies in general. CHAPTER THREE
MARY WILKINS FREEMAN
Sarah Orne Jewett once said to Willa Cather that "You must know the world before you can know the village."* Jewett's writing reflects this dictum in its feeling of detachment achieved through her use of external narrators, and through her urbane style. For Mary Wilkins
Freeman, literary portraiture worked in the opposite way. Through the eighties and nineties, when the greatest part of her best writing was produced, she gave the impression that she was trying to learn the world through the village. As we have already noted, Freeman's early life was a confining one in comparison to Jewett's. Neo-Puritanism, poverty, and overprotection by her parents all circumscribed her. And because she lacked the opportunity for mobility that Jewett had, Freeman knew the pressures of the village, in which, as Perry Westbrook states, any child growing up "would find ready-made a code of behavior and a set of life- 2 values and goals that would be difficult not to accept."
Coming from such a sheltered background, Freeman found herself throughout much of her adult life wanting to retreat or to escape. The woman who at age thirty was, according to her biographer, "still
1. Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1936), p. 88.
2. Pembroke, ed. Westbrook, p. 8.
75 76 3 essentially a clinging and affectionate girl," spent much of her adult
life returning to the security of her dear friends the Aldens in Randolph
"because she believed that she could not write elsewhere." 4 At age 42
she wrote, "I have a constant longing to go to land where there are no
circumstances."^ And by "circumstances," Freeman presumably meant those
events or pressures -- economic, social or moral -- which impinged upon
the impulses.
Freeman's sensitivity to circumstances did, however, equip her
for the production of literary offerings distinctive for their ability to
portray painfully narrow lives. If she did not know the world as Jewett
knew it, she came, because of the confinements of her life, to master
what Matthiessen has described as the "ability to give the breathless
intensity of a moment.Freeman excelled in depicting those instances
when the forces of habit and heritage collide with innate human demands.
Pattee wrote, "It is not hers to trace the slow development of a soul
through a long period; it is hers to deal with climactic episodes, with
the one moment in a repressed life when the repression gives way and the 7 long pent-up forces sweep all before them." A contemporary review of The
3. Foster, p. 50.
4. Foster, p. 87.
5. Foster, p. 118.
6. F. 0. Matthiessen, "New England Stories ," in John Macy, ed., American Writers on American Literature (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1931), p. 406.
7. Pattee, American Literature Since 1870, pp. 237-38. New England Nun and Other Stories stated, "The compression of these stories is remarkable, and almost unique in our literature, and it is
gained without any sacrifice of essentials and by no mere narrowness of
aim, but by holding steadily before the mind the central, vital idea, to
O the exclusion of all by-thoughts, however interesting they may be."
The thematic compression of a Freeman work, along with the com pressed lives of her characters, is emphasized and reinforced in two primary mechanical ways: through her use of taut, unadorned prose and through her development of stories around symbols. Again, both devices seem a reflection of her New England upbringing. Her prose exhibits a true Yankee sense of economy, verging on parsimoniousness. The words, if spoken, would seem almost at times to have come from a mouth tightly hardened against the encroachments of the world. Pattee wrote that "Her short sentence-structure is a part of her personal equation; it is her g literary length of stride." Her material is, he said, presented
"intensely with no more thought of ornamentation than had her Puritan ancestors when they poured out their burning convictions of sin and salvation.Freeman herself wrote in an article for Harper's Bazaar called "The Girl Who Wants to Write: Things to Do and Avoid": "Above all things in the matter of style strive for clarity .... If you lack
8. "New England in the Short Story," Atlantic Monthly, 67 (1891), 847.
9. F. L. Pattee, Sidelights on American Literature (New York: Century, Co., 1922), p. 200.
10. Pattee, Sidelights, p. 201. complete mastery of a language, use short sentences and simple words."**
Freeman did not have complete mastery* Hei1 sentences lacked the flow, the movement of Jewett's. Yet Freeman's prose was never a liability to her fiction. While Jewett's language reflected the ease of a partial outsider who was able to leave the painful situations she described.
Freeman's prose was the natural extension of one who knew the pain directly, and never totally freed herself front it.
Freeman's heavy use of symbol seems an additional feirlection Of confining circumstances. In a Freeman story one often has the feeling that a symbol is an outlet for a writer who was schooled against 60n= fronting her culture: that is, a symbol could serve as a buffer between her critical resentments and her society* She could, fot example, talk about matters like sexual inhibition at a tiirie (during the first hall her career, at least) when a non-symbolic, more explicit treatment flight have lost her her audience. At the same time, a symbol had cortcretertess desirable to a person who was, as we shaii see, annoyed by abstractisns•
Austin Warren writes that "Miss Wilkins' mind, iike that of Henry James 12 . . . , was not 'violated by ideas* *'* Freeman had iearned much fi'offl direct observation of nature, and, generally, she transferred such directness to her literature. Her characters did not have tb enact
11. Mary Wilkins Freeman, "The Girl Who wants to Wfitel Things to Do and Avoid," Harper's Bazaar, 47 (June, i9l3), 272,
12. Austin Warren, The New England Conscience (Ann Arboi4! University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 169* 79 theories. They could, instead, enact patterns of behavior as tangible to 13 Freeman as the world around her.
Unsurprisingly, one of the stories by Jewett which Freeman most admired is one of the rare instances when Jewett uses a dominant central symbol. In reply to a letter from Jewett praising her Humble Romance and
Other Stories, Freeman wrote, "You are lovely to write me so about my stories, but I never wrote any story equal to your 'White Heron.1 I don't think I ever read a short story, unless I except Tolstoy's 'Two 14 Deaths,' that so appealed to me." The story, clearly one of Jewett's finest, uses the great coastal bird to symbolize the bond necessary between nature and man for regeneration to occur. Asked by an ornitholo gist to lead him to the bird so he can kill it, a little girl realizes that there are some things more important than the human approval her compliance would bring. Sylvia "remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away."*^ Freeman added in her note to Jewett,
"I would not have given up that bird any more than you would if he [the ornithologist] had come back." For Freeman, as for Jewett, life is given
13. Freeman has been compared to Hawthorne in her use of the symbol. See "Madelon," The Bookman, 3 (1896), 298, and Pattee, Sidelights, p. 195. Westbrook several times makes such a comparison: Acres of Flint, p. 98; Mary Wilkins Freeman, p. 154; and Pembroke, ed. Perry Westbrook (New Haven: College and University Press, 1971), p. 24.
14. Matthiessen, Jewett, p. 84.
15. Sarah Ome Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1886), p. 22. 80 to be lived; and Freeman's literary mission, to a great extent, was to counteract the severe undervaluation of life she saw throughout her region.
Freeman's attempt at generating individual and regional re-evaluation can be seen in the use of three dominant floral symbols which recur throughout her forty years as a writer. She associated the lilac with spiritual and emotional stagnation in those who use an unyielding adherence to routines to compensate for emotional failure.
The rose, on the other hand, symbolized the simultaneous presence and acceptance of natural impulses in persons. Her concern with the rose is allied to Jewett's belief in the positive powers of instinct. A third symbol, the lily, was closely related to the rose in Freeman, since it was the symbol of regeneration. The lily was generally tied to the process of discovery, a process countering those perceptual failures which in turn caused emotion and spiritual failures. Such discoveries are catalytic, means to an end, rather than ends in themselves. This is not to say, however, that the three symbols were rigidly fixed throughout
Freeman's writings. They could vary slightly. They caught the shadows of their surroundings, like the symbols of all good writers, and reflected the individual characteristics of the persons they were linked to. More over, they grew as the writer herself grew, and as her understanding of love, sex, frustration and defeat evolved.
Essential to an understanding of the lilac symbol is "A Symphony in Lavender" (A Humble Romance), a story which has provoked primarily 81 negative comments among critics.1^ If the story is given over to authorial gimmickry at times, it is nonetheless a primer, among Freeman's writings, for an understanding of the lilac's relationship to the other two floral symbols. Freeman also succeeded in keeping a potentially sentimental story under control through the use of a visitor-narrator such as one finds in Jewett. Freeman rarely used such a narrative device, but in "Symphony" the outsider's perceptions help to set up a layer of ironies which gives depth to the work.
The subject of "A Symphony in Lavender" is the proto-type of all
Freeman lilac women. As with the characters who will succeed her,
Caroline Munson has a lingering suggestion of both lilac and lavender about her. As the narrator explains, the odor of both hints of something from the past which has survived with delicate durability. The lilac is
"a dull bloom" with a "shy antiquated grace." A lilac, she writes, "does seem a little older than some flowers." Even Caroline's mode of dress suggests the wearing of a uniform, as if in service to some greater cause than oneself. "Lilac seemed to be her favorite color for gowns, for she wore that afternoon a delicious old-fashioned lilac muslin that looked as if it had been laid away in lavender every winter for the last thirty years." Caroline exemplifies a ritual approach to life. For her,
16. Jobes, p. 122, comments that in "Symphony" Freeman "is not so convincing as with her precise symbolism in "A New England Nun.'" Foster, p. 70, criticizes what in reality is the story's greatest strength, when he objects to the narrator's acting as "entirely too much the summer visitor; she is more knowing than Miss Munson but still too obviously reticent and genteel." 82
accoutrements, because of her ability to control them, seem more important
than more substantial variables, such as emotions and sensations. And
yet, so serene is her existence, that her very ritualization can be
attractive to an onlooker.
The narrator, in fact, is strongly attracted to Caroline's con
strained life-style. Like many of Jewett's narrators, Freeman's has the
enthusiasm of a curio-hunter, and delights in the little world of Caroline
which seems so well-preserved against the progression of time. She is
intrigued by the old Munson house which is guarded by two giant lilac
bushes "in full blossom" and "a hedge of lilacs, kept low by constant
cropping," which "began at the blooming lilac-trees, and reached around
the rest of the house at the top of the face-wall." She takes special note of the subdued interior of the house, particularly the parlor where the glare of the present seems carefully excluded:
There was not one vivid tint in that parlor; everything had the dimness of age over it. All the brightness was gone out of the carpet. Large, shadowy figures sprawled over the floor, their indistinctness giving them the suggestion of grace, and the polish on the mahogany furniture was too dull to reflect the light. The gilded scrolls on the wall-paper no longer shone, and over some of the old engravings on the walls a half- transparent film that looked like mist had spread. Outside, a cool green shadow lay over the garden, and soft, lazy puffs of lilac air came in at the windows (pp. 41-42).
The setting is perfect for one who, like the narrator, seems in search of
a mellow, serviceable relationship to the past.
Caroline, however, is the chief object of attraction for the
visitor. She suspects in Caroline the fading of what was once a
"remarkable youthful beauty." She delights to think that something beneath the surface explains Caroline's low-keyed existence, that the 83 past had been refined throughout Caroline's life for some reason: "All I could think of sometimes, when with her, was a person walking in a garden and getting continually delicious little sniffs of violets, so that her visitor certainly knew they were near him, although they were hidden somewhere under the leaves, and he could not see them. There would not be a day that Miss Munson would not say things that were so many hints of a rare sweetness and beauty of nature, which her shyness and quietness did not let appear all at once."
The visitor's suspicions are confirmed one day near the end of her stay in the Vermont town. Caroline narrates a dream she has had as a girl, a dream about a spring day when the scent of lilacs was in the air. 17 In her dream she had walked down an elm-lined road, and had carried with her, lilies and roses — "mostly white, or else the very faintest pink" — the symbols of life and rebirth. On the road she had encountered a man with "a handsome dark face," who carried an artist's easel, and who asked her for one of her flowers. Caroline recounts how "I gathered courage to glance up at him then, and when his eyes met mine it did seem
17. Freeman often uses elms in much the same way O'Neill would in Desire Under the Elms, to serve as guardians of heritage which mother individuals with "the old ways." In a number of her works Freeman speaks of "ancestral elms." See, for example, "The Elm," in her volume of symbol-studies, Six Trees (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903). The giant tree becomes a kind of sheltering mother for David Ransom, who is threatened with removal from his homestead. In "Symphony," Freeman des cribes how the Munson house had "no beauty in itself, being boldly plain and glaring, like all of its kind; but the green waving boughs of the elms and lilacs and the undulating shadows they cast toned it down, and give it an air of coolness and quiet and lonely reserve." to me that I wanted to give him one of these flowers more than anything
else in the world. I looked into my basket, and had my fingers on the stem of the finest lily there, when something came whirring and fanning by my face and settled on my shoulder, and when I turned my head, with my
heart beating loud there was a white dove." The dream-Caroline has
almost given in to her impulses, but seemingly under some kind of spiri tual constraint transmitted by the bird, and despite "a sort of fascina tion" for the man "which would not let me take my eyes from him," she has
fled from those impulses.
The symbols from Caroline's dream suggest a sexual crisis; and,
as we shall see in Chapter Four, Freeman dealt with sexual repression on
more than one occasion. The male figure is a threat to Caroline, and
when the dream becomes a reality, when such a man materializes sometime
after the dream, Caroline's sexual fears are already too fully awakened
to permit her to respond positively to him:
I knew from the first that I loved him dearly, but from the first there was, as there was in my dream, a kind of horror of him along with the love; it kept me from being entirely happy. The night before he went away he spoke. We had been out to walk, and were standing here at my door. He asked me to marry him. I looked up in his face, and felt just as I did in my dream. I cannot explain it. It was as if I saw no more of the kindness and the love in it, only something else -- evil -- and the same horror came over me (pp. 46-48).
Caroline Munson, on the verge of physical and emotional vitality, lapses
into the old view that human drives are akin to evil. She never again
approaches the possibility of fullness, but contents herself with the
mustiness of the Munson house. When she speaks of the dream's effect
upon "my after-life," she in effect admits the deadened existence which 85 has resulted from her repression. Caroline does in fact die the winter after she tells her story to the narrator; and looking at the untended
Munson garden (dead except for the lilacs), the narrator's housekeeper exclaims, "I do believe that Caroline Munson, if she is an angel -- and I suppose she is -- doesn't look much more different from what she did before than those lilacs over there do from last year's ones."
The lesson afforded by Caroline Munson and the observation of the housekeeper appear, however, to be lost on the narrator. The woman who has exclaimed on first viewing Caroline's mode of existence "Oh, it was all lovely, and it was so little trouble to enjoy it," seems ultimately unwilling to admit that Caroline's shadowy world is obviously an unenlightened one. After a tea at Caroline's the visitor has exclaimed,
"I do believe the surroundings and the circumstances imparted a subtle flavor to everything I tasted, which gave rise to something higher than mere gustatory delight, or maybe it was my mood; but it certainly seemed to me that I never before enjoyed a tea so much."
The narrator's attraction to Caroline, and her willingness to overlook the reality of Caroline's lifeless existence, is explained by her own musings on the crucial dream. She presumes to know the artist
Caroline is talking about, partly through a need to justify her identifi cation with Caroline. "It was obvious I could form no correct opinion unless I knew that man. I wondered if I did. There was an artist of about the right age whom I though of. If he were the one — well, I think Miss Munson was right." The possibility is strong that the narrator herself has experienced her own sexual or emotional crisis, or so the illogic of her implicating one man on the basis of another's dream would suggest. Her attraction to Caroline becomes, therefore, more understandable. Caroline's lilac existence, and the ritual enacted in response to emotional failure, confirms what seems to be a predisposition to peaceful submission in the narrator. Caroline's perpetual past justi fies her onlooker's apparent desire to avoid the impulsive world of the present.
Such a pattern of emotional failure is repeated throughout a num ber of other Freeman characters. Their retreats are less clearly of sexual origin in most cases; but throughout, their stress upon ritual is a consistent result of failure. Best known is Louisa Ellis, the "New
England Nun," whose fears may indeed be sexual. For fourteen years she has awaited with dread the return of Joe Dagget who, like so many men from New England after the Civil War, had gone west to seek his fortune.
In anticipation of the homecoming of this man she has promised to marry,
Louisa dotes obsessively upon routine and external order -- preserving each as a guard against what seems to her the threatening world of emotion. She is pictured, for instance, as she "gloated gently over her orderly bureau-drawers, with their exquisitely faded contents redolent with lavender and sweet clover and very purity." The dresser is sacred to Louisa, as is everything in the house which has the element of surface neatness about it. Louisa herself wears as many as three aprons at once, which she removes one by one according to the domestic ritual being enacted at the time. When Louisa sets out her afternoon tea, she does it
"with as much grace as if she had been a veritable guest to her own self." 87
Quite clearly, Louisa is^ her own guest. She never has, and apparently never wants to, fully confront herself, body, mind and emotion. The peace she derives from externals is enough.
Louisa's fear of herself is symbolized by her dog Caesar.
Because of a mishap as a pup, Caesar has been chained to his little house for most of his fourteen years, a span of time equal to Dagget's absence. He is tied to his house in the same way Louisa has been tied to hers, and for much the same reason. Louisa sees her old vulnerability to Dagget as much like Caesar's puppy failure. Each failure is magni fied by the bondage which has ensued. Caesar, like Louisa's emotions, has acquired a reputation for ferocity precisely because of his tethering: "Caesar at large might have seemed a very ordinary dog, and excited no comment whatever; chained, his reputation overshadowed him, so that he lost his own proper outlines and looked darkly vague and enor mous." Thus Caesar has lived for fourteen years on an "ascetic fare of com-mush and cakes," while Louisa Ellis has chosen her ascetic worship of lilac-scented, perfectly ordered bureau-drawers.
Priscilla and Mary Brown, twin sisters in "A Faraway Melody" (A
Humble Romance), are examples of how repression can evolve into a desire for death. They live in a house smothered by the flower of repression:
"Close to them in the yard outside stood great clumps of lilac bushes.
They grew on the other side of the front door too; a little later the low
cottage would look half-buried in them." The sisters themselves have
been buried in surface ritual throughout their lives. Even their hanging of clothes to dry follows precise patterns: "Everything of a kind went together, and the best things on the outside line, which could be seen from the street in front of the cottage."
The susceptibility to patterned behavior in the sisters is owing in large part to their methodical assimilation of religion.
Both these women had always been of a deeply religious cast of mind. They had studied the Bible faithfully, if not under- standingly, and their religion had strongly tinctured their daily life. They knew almost as much about the Old Testament prophets as they did about their neighbors; and that was saying a good deal of two single women in a New England country town. Still this religious element in their natures could hardly have been termed spirituality. It deviated from that as much as anything of religion -- which is in one way spirituality itself -- could (p. 211).
Freeman makes their religion as spiritually significant as their clothes- hanging ritual. Both sisters, and especially Priscilla, "had dealt in religion with the bare facts of sin and repentance, future punishment and reward." One thinks of Ludwig Lewisohn's condemnation of a pattern of behavior which he felt the Puritans left behind them: "For these dark
Calvinists drove God out of the world and intensified unbearably the opposition between a small and artificial world of grace and the boundless wilderness of sin. By consigning nine-tenths of human life to the devil, 18 they withdrew it from cultivation and control." The Brown sisters' religion contains much of the old black-and-white theology, and their superficial rituals are, they think, justification for ignoring more spontaneous approaches to life.
18. Ludwig Lewisohn, Expression in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932), p. 1. Priscilla illustrates her spiritual and emotional failings when
she says one spring morning, "I wonder, Mary, if it would seem so very
queer to die a mornin1 like this, say?" As she explains, spring puts her
in mind not of the possibilities of life, but of the desirability of
death. "I feel well enough," she says to Mary, "an1 I don't know what
has got me talkin' so much about dyin1 lately, or thinkin' about it. I
guess it's the spring weather. P'r'aps flower growin' makes anybody
think of wings sproutin* kinder naterally." With such a view of life,
Priscilla's eventual death that spring comes as no surprise; nor does
Mary's wish to join her sister in death. The old routines are broken,
and Mary is defenseless in a world of alterable facts. Refusing to go on by herself, she waits a year for the same "unearthly melody" of death, and also expires quietly. For each sister, the moment of greatest full ness in life comes immediately before death. Mary calls out from her death-bed with "a shrill cry of rapture" that she has heard the "far-away melody" her sister has claimed to hear at her death: "A faint sound o' music like the dyin1 away of a bell."
A fuller study of the lilac-figure is Camilla Merritt in the 1897 novel Jerome. Not only does Camilla effectively represent the repressive impulses which stifle the love between Jerome Edwards and her niece
Lucina Merritt, but she offers tacit encouragement to the old "conviction 19 of sin" attitude which manifests itself in Jerome as he confronts modern economic hardships. Camilla is guardian spirit for those who would yield to old attitudes.
Freeman may well have had Virgil in mind when she chose the name for her lilac maiden. The Aeneid protrayed Camilla as the Amazon, favored by Diana, who engaged the Trojans on the plains of Latium. In
Dryden's translation, Diana herself speaks of Camilla's virtues and how
The Tuscan matrons with each other vied, To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me The sylvan shades of vow'd virginity. (XI: 871-74)
Camilla is eventually to be killed in battle, but Diana, the guardian spirit of chastity, is consoled that
Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofan'd Her holy limbs with any human hand, And in a marble tomb laid in her native land. (XI: 889-92)
Camilla Merritt, true to her possible namesake, is a figure of total maidenhood. She is, we are told the first time we see her, accompanied by "a delicate breath of lavender" which seems to precede her actual appearance.
19. For a personal discussion of this process see the chapter entitled "The Painful Embarassment of Salvation" in Mary Ellen Chase's A Goodly Heritage (New York: H. Holt § Co., 1932). In it she explains the trauma of conversion for a girl growing up in the 1890's, conversion enacted primarily through a process of self-abasement. For a more technical discussion of "the conviction of sin" see Chapter Three of Edmund S. Morgan's Visible Saints (New York: New York University Press, 1963). 91
Like Virgil's maiden, Camilla Merritt is infused with a spirit of sanctified self-denial, or, in Aunt Camilla's case, self-denial sancti fied by the past. Her life proceeds according to the consistent belief that "long existence always proved the sacredness of a law."20 Such acquiescence to established ideas has kept Camilla's life free of self- discovery, but, at the same time, invariably peaceful. Even as she approaches middle age, "Camilla's soft and slender body had none of those stiff, distorted lines which come from resistance to the forced attitudes of life. Her body and her soul had been amenable to all discipline. She had leaned sweetly against all her crosses, instead of straining away from them with fierce cramps and agonies of resistance.
In every motion she had the freedom of utter yielding, which surpasses the freedom of action." As with Caroline Munson, Camilla Merritt's life style seems seductive enough, particularly her setting "a greater value upon peace of mind than upon aught else" (p. 359).
Camilla presides comfortably over the love of Jerome for Lucina, a love which Jerome has denied because of his belief that poverty is penance to be undertaken only through the greatest exertions. In the manner of Camilla, he has yielded to a "forced attitude," to a long- established belief. To accept the wealth of the Merritts would be to defile the sacredness of the belief and destroy his own strange peace of mind as he labors penetentially.
20. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], Jerome, A Poor Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897), p. 109. All page references included in the text of the dissertation are from this edition. 92
Camilla is hostess at the only two meetings of any length that
Jerome and Lucina have while they are growing up. Jerome is first
brought to tea at Camilla's by Squire Merritt. The boy, undergoing his
own ritualized response to poverty, comes to Camilla almost like a
worshipper, at a time when one would expect him to resent wealth. Jerome,
"drawn within this atmosphere of virgin superiority and gentleness, felt
all his defiance and antagonism towards his newly discovered pride of 21 life shame him" (p. 116). The monastic air of the house combines
perfectly with the tea-time ritual for the penetential Jerome. The
incense for the rite is, of course, provided by the lavender in Miss
Camilla's garments, an odor "which seemed, like the subtle fragrance of
individuality and life itself, to enter his thoughts rather than his
senses." The word "seems" is important, for Camilla represents the sub
mission to well-established forces which approximated what Freeman saw
going on in her region. Moreoever, she represents an advocacy of the
mind, as opposed to the senses, which leads to the willfulness that
Freeman questions in her preface to Pembroke.
The tea-scene at Camilla's is repeated some years later when
Lucina invites Jerome, his sister Elmira, and Elmira's fiance. Further
along in his atonement for poverty, Jerome's ingrained control by routine
leads him, at Camilla's, to view death in the manner of the Brown sisters.
In the midst of his life of toil, he senses the desirability of death as
21. Her house is much like Caroline Munson's with its gauzy interior. Even her fireplace is filled with "the feathery green of asparagus, which also waves lightly over the gilded looking-glass, and was reflected airily therein" — p. 357. 93 the perfect escape. "Jerome, in the arbor with three happy young people, taking for the first time since his childhood a holiday on a work-day, seemed to comprehend the first notes of that great harmony of life which proves by the laws of sequence the last. The premonition of some final blessedness, to survive all renunciation and sacrifice, was upon him. He felt raised above the earth with happiness" (p. 348). In the pleasant atmosphere of Camilla Merritt's garden, Jerome is induced to see death as the only outlet in nature possible to him. The possibility of joy in this life escapes him, as it does until the very end of the novel, when he learns that the pride of renunciation is something to be avoided rather than extolled.
Other Freeman characters approximate the lilac figures as models of renunciation and self-doubt reinforced through carefully adhered-to routines. They are not, however, specifically associated with the lilac 22 symbol. Inez Morse in "A Taste of Honey" (A Humble Romance) parallels
Jerome Edwards in her slavery to a mortgage. She refuses to let the man she loves help her, and as a result loses him. Throughout most of her life "Old Lady Pingree" (A Humble Romance) is so preoccupied with death
22. The lilac also appears occasionally in Freeman to indicate an individual's potential danger of slipping into a death-like state. When Candace Whitcomb, the "Village Singer" (A New England Nun), reacts unreasonably against her being replaced as church soloist, her parlor is shown to contain "a pitcher with a bunch of white lilacs. The whole room was scented with them." As Charlotte Barnard, in Pembroke, estranged from her lover by his unreasonable vow, approaches Barney's house in the hope he has relented, "Lilacs were in blossom all about and their fra grance was so vital and intense that it seemed almost like a wide pre sence in the green twilight." The fragrance foreshadows her discovery that Barnabas has retreated even deeper into his life of denial. that she refuses to live. The thrust of her life is captured in her utterance to a neighbor: "I'm the last of the hull family, you know, an1 they were pretty smart folks. It's all run out now. I ain't nothin', but I'd kinder like to have my buryin' done like the others." Fidelia
Almy, the "Patient Waiter" (A Humble Romance), for forty years tries to stop time in anticipation of a lover she knows will not return to her.
Betsey Dole, "A Poetess" (A New England Nun), confines her emotions to the production of sentimental verse which she grinds out according to the popular style of the time. She so little believes in her verse, however, that a few critical words from an unfeeling minister about her writing are a death-blow. Amanda Pratt, who shares a duplex with the title character in Jane Field, is so rut-bound that the act of leaving home for a week becomes a "reckless defiance of faith." Amanda's home is, in fact, a kind of mausoleum, whose objects are, to her, primarily things which will survive her. So overwhelmed is she by the durability of her surroundings that she views death as the ultimate defeat which makes exertion in life useless.
Sylvia Crane, of Pembroke, is perhaps the most fascinating of the
Freeman women -- and they are almost always women -- who enact a severe self-denial. Reduced to poverty, Sylvia refuses to ask her family for help, deciding instead to go to the poorhouse. The night before she is to leave her home, she submits to what she feels is her fate. Her manner objectifies what Lewis Mumford has called "pragmatic acquiescence" common 23 to the late nineteenth century. "All her blind and helpless rage
against life and the obdurately beneficient force which had been her
conception of providence was gone. When the battle is over there is no
more need for the fury of combat. Sylvia felt her battle was over, and 24 she felt the peace of defeat." The final phrase neatly captures the
state of mind of most Freeman lilac characters. Unable to accept the
challenge of their own potential strengths, they submit to symbols of
external order, whether such symbols are clothes-lines or almshouses.
"The peace of defeat" is a seductive sounding concept, a phrase which may
well be applied to the life-styles of Caroline Munson or Camilla Merritt.
And it is this very seductiveness which Freeman tries to combat as she
pursues her other floral symbols.
The rose as a life-symbol appeared occasionally in Freeman's
early writings, and with more frequency later on when she began to drift
away from her initial negativism. Concurrently, the lilac practically
disappeared as a symbol in Freeman's writings after 1900. The early
Freeman had a greater tolerance for tragedy than did the later. One must
assume that Granville Hicks, who wrote that Freeman could not "resist the
23. See Chapter Four in The Golden Day. Mumford speaks of the generation at the close of the nineteenth century as one which had "lost the power of choice; it bowed to the inevitable; it swam with the tide; and it went as far as the tide would carry it."
24. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], Pembroke (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894), p. 274. All page references included in the text of the dissertation are from this edition. 96 25 temptation of the happy ending," concentrated too heavily on her later writings.
In the earlier writings the rose-figure — the individual who
lives impulsively, intuitively, bringing body and emotion into a level of importance equal to the mind — is basically an ideal. During the first half of her career, Freeman and her characters are never fully able to discount the pressures of tradition. Rather, characters manifest varying degrees of the rose qualities. The most unfettered of the early Freeman characters is Rose Berry, whose very name stands out amid the stern- sounding Old Testament names of the villagers in Pembroke. Throughout the novel, Rose is described in strikingly sensual terms. The author speaks of how "Rose's face between the green sides of her bonnet had in it all the quickened bloom of youth in spring; her eyes had all the blue surprise of violets; she panted softly between red swelling lips as she walked; pulses beat in her crimson cheeks. Her slender figure yielded to the wind as to a lover" (p. 79). At another time she is contrasted to
Barnabas Thayer, a masculine example of emotional failure whose love for
Charlotte Barnard has been unable to overcome a vow he made years earlier.
As she talked to Barnabas, "Rose blushed softly, a new look came into her eyes, she smiled up at him, and her face was all pink and sweet and fully set towards him, like a rose for which he was a sun." Freeman details how, in the eyes of Barnabas, at least, "Rose, in the heart of New
England, bred after the precepts of orthodoxy, was a pagan, and she worshipped Love himself" (p. 132).
25. Hicks, p. 56. y7
Yet while Rose Berry opens herself to love more fully than most
characters from New England fiction, her love is ultimately circumscribed
by the attitudes of the Pembroke villagers. Rose chooses to marry someone not considered a good "catch" by the town. While it is forecast that she
"was and would be happy enough," Freeman notes that Rose herself "had a
little sense of humiliation when she reflected that Tommy Ray, younger than herself, tending store under her brother, was not exactly a brilliant match for her, and that everybody in the village would think so" 26 (p. 268). She follows her impulses by entering into marriage, but for the first time allows public scrutiny to make her question the validity of those impulses.
Two other rose-figures in the pre-1900 writings come into even greater conflict with society than Rose Berry, and the consequences are proportionally more painful. As mixtures of lilac and rose they are aware of their own life-dirves, but are in love with persons who must come to the same recognition. Such a mixture is displayed when Jerome
Edwards sees Lucina Merritt and her Aunt Camilla walking to church together. Camilla "glided along drooping slenderly in black lace and lilac silk, with a great wrought-lace veil flowing like a bride's over her head, and shading with a black tracery of leaves and flowers her fair faded face." Lucina, however, wears a pale blue dress "spangled
26. In Freeman, the phrase "the village" is often used with some bitterness, since it is the collective agent for conformity and repression in New England. In MadeIon, for example, she speaks of the "spirit of persecution and righteous indignation which finds easy birth in New England villages"; and, of "That black atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, which gathers nowhere more easily than in a New England town." with roses." Her skirts "were so wide and trained over a hoop and
starched petticoats that they swung and tilted like a great flower."
Camilla, as usual, is a shadow of life. Even her bride-veil, surrounded
by dark traceries, symbolizes her commitment to the denial of life. The
rose imagery surrounding Lucina contrasts to the darkness of her aunt,
yet the girl still remains under the influence of Camilla so long as
Jerome suppresses his love. This conjunction of lilac and rose is
repeated when Lucina comes to the Edwards' home to invite Jerome to the
second tea-party. Jerome notices, "the moment he opened the outer door,
the breath of roses and lavender, and a subtle thrill of excitement and
almost fear passed over him." The scene typifies Jerome's agonizing
inability throughout the novel to respond to feelings which would
alleviate his willful pursuit of an idea — in the manner of Joanna Todd.
As a consequence, Lucina suffers with him.
The impingment of society on impulse leads to violence in Madelon,
the Freeman novel of the nineties least favored by critics.2? Madelon
Hautville is, as Westbrook has pointed out, a continuation of the "dark heroine" of American literature who is contrasted to a fairer
27. See Foster, p. 138, who berates the novel as "a confusion of cross-purposes and twisted but uninteresting motives." See also the review in Book Buyer, 13 (1896), 358, which incredibly feels the central character is underdrawn. At the same time George Preston of The Bookman — "Concerning Good English," The Bookman, 3 (1896), 361-62 — was offended by "the many unrefined references to the promiscuous kissing that sounds throughout the book like the popping of fire-crackers." The last assessment is more predictable, for in Madelon, more than in any of her early works, Freeman seems to be trying to offend at times. 99
28 counterpart. As a dark heroine she suggests, like the others, the unconscious side of the human psyche. MadeIon is described in sensual terms:
She had tended a monthly rose in the south window all winter, and she wore two red roses in her black braids. Her cheeks and her lips were fuller of warm life than the roses .... No costly finery had Madelon Hautville, but she had done some cunning needle-work on an old black-satin gown of her mother's, and it was fitted as softly over her sweet curves as a leaf over a bud. A long garland of flowers after her own design had she wrought in bright-colored silks around the petticoat, and there were knots of red ribbon to fasten the loopings here and there. And she wore another red rose in her lace tucker, against the soft brown bosom. Madelon wore, too, trim black-silk stockings with red clocks over her slender ankles, and little black-satin shoes with steel buckles and red rosettes.29
Madelon is strikingly exotic. Even her singing voice carries "the very breath of the spices of Arabia."
Behind Madelon, however, is her dead mother, who acts as a spirit of restraint and inhibition. In the foregoing description one notices the black gown of the mother which the girl tries to offset with roses and vivid colors. Her mother was one of the "village girls," a product of the New England system of constraints and propriety. She had
28. Westbrook, Freeman, p. 106. The complementary heroine in Madelon is Dorothy Fair who is "white and fair as an angel" and whose "fine sense of decorum and womanly pride had always served her mainly in the place of courage" (p. 96). The daughter of a Puritanical minister, she seems to be basically a lilac maiden, but like Madelon, eventually enacts her own revolt against heritage. Her lilac qualities are mixed with rose qualities CPP- 9 and 85) in much the same way Madelon's rose qualities are mixed with lilac qualities.
29. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], Madelon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), p. 12. All page references included in the text of the dissertation are from this edition. 100 been a strange contrast to the dark-blooded Hautvilles, but her influence upon Madelon has been lasting. On one occasion Freeman mentions how "the self-restraint of her mother" was upon Madelon (p. 204).
The combination of sensuality and the enduring mother-element produces a potent, volatile duality in Madelon. Once, when she sits in the parlor of the man she loves and his highly proper mother, Madelon is seen as a "female of another and an older race. She might well from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds and scholars"
(pp. 149-150). But then, too, "enough of the New England conscience she had to give her a certain comfort in holding herself to duty, like a knife to a grindstone" (p. 248). Madelon may, like Rose Berry, be a kind of pagan, but she is a pagan with New England roots. Even the old
Hautville homestead, now burned to the ground, "might have seemed fabu lous had it not been for the thicket of old lilacs purpling with bloom every spring, which had first grown before its windows" (p. 264).
The clash of impulse and social restraint causes Madelon to react violently when she sees the elements objectified outwardly. She is unable to accept the sense of propriety which keeps Burr Gordon, the man she loves, pledged to Dorothy Fair, even though it becomes obvious that he cares little for that delicate creature. Madelon grows to feel that her own beauty "was cheapened" in the presence of Dorothy's prim, but apparently victorious, Puritanism. "She saw herself swarthy and 101 harsh-faced as some old savage squaw beside this fair angel." In response to this feeling of self-abasement, and unable to reconcile inner and outer dictates, Madelon stabs Lot Gordon, thinking he is his cousin
Burr. Lot, the only figure in the novel who truly understands the struggle between natural and social forces, becomes a sacrificial victim to those who do not understand.
After 1900, Freeman's concern over the power of "the village" began to abate. She had begun to travel more, and had settled in New
Jersey, away from the harsher New England constraints. At a time, too, when her own marriage (to Dr. Charles Freeman in 1902) was steadily deteriorating, she produced an increasingly blithe fictive world of love.
Most of the rose-figures during this later period are triumphant, unsullied by imposed patterns of behavior. While they are less beset by circumstances, they do, however, continue, and to an extent actualize, what Freeman has pictured as potentiality in the earlier rose-women.
Two pieces from The Fair Lavinia and Others (1907) use the rose as a symbol of honest and direct human love, although both stories are unworthy of Freeman's talents. In "Amarina's Roses" the title figure defies strictures against assertive women and marrying below one's station when she proposes marriage to a reluctant lover. "Eglantina" is a watered-down recollection of Hawthorne's "Birthmark." In the midst of oppressive moralizing about inner beauty, Freeman does, however, offer her belief in the unconscious power of the rose-figure. Eglantina is compared to the rose in her lack of self-prepossessiveness: "The rose does not know she is herself, else she would be no rose." 102
Two other late tales prove more satisfying artistically. "Little
Lucy Rose," from The Copy-Cat and Other Stories (1914), is one of a number of well-written portraits of children in a remarkably good volume. Lucy illustrates the essential rose characteristic touched upon in "Eglantina," the predisposition to "being" rather than "knowing." She possesses a vitality which minimizes the need for much thought. "A small, daintily clad child," Lucy "spoke and moved daintily and softly, and when her blue eyes were fixed upon anybody's face, that person straightway saw love and obedience and trust in them, and love met love half-way." While Lucy is not a brilliant child, "she held love like a precious vase, and it gave out a perfume better than mere knowledge." She is directly counter to the willfulness of Jerome Edwards, Barnabas Thayer, Louisa Ellis and others.
The most curious rose-figure in Freeman is Arabella Lambert from the sketch "Peony" in Understudies (1901), a volume of symbolic nature studies. In "Amarina's Roses" Freeman has suggested that peonies, while not really roses, may nonetheless "be considered gigantic symbolisms of them." In "Peony" she speaks of the flowers as "exaggerated copies" of roses. So, too, Arabella Lambert is an exaggerated copy of the other rose-women. A fat woman, Arabella is nonetheless a "rosy, easy, sensuous creature" with "no power of reserve." In her predisposition to giving and receiving freely and in her acceptance of life as it comes day by day, Arabella differs from the majority of village women who were "thin and pale, with closely shut, thin lips, delicately sharp chins and noses, and high narrow foreheads" -- women who nourished their souls on 103
"unwatered and unsweetened doctrines and laws and their bodies on bread and pastry." Arabella's easy pleasure in life defies the life-styles of the women who "had lived so long and worked so hard that they seemed like automatons, kept in motion by some past effort of the will."
Arabella's ability to give and receive is shown in greater depth in the portrait of Rose Fletcher in The Shoulders of Atlas. A pot-boiler 30 writtem under the most bizarre conditions, the 1907 novel is nonethe- 31 less one of Freeman's most readable works. As we shall see in Chapter
Four, The Shoulders of Atlas confronts some of Freeman's deepest concerns, such as the work ethic and sexual repression. In a book dealing with oppression of the individual by man-made attitudes, Rose Fletcher stands 32 out as an advocate of the free human spirit. She has "a singularly sweet, ungrasping disposition, and an almost childlike trait of accepting 33 that which was offered her as the one and only thing which she deserved."
30. As explained in some detail in Westbrook's Freeman, pp. 155- 56, the novel was the result of a trans-Atlantic writing duel sponsored by the New York Herald.
31. Foster, p. 176, calls it "superior to all but the two or three best pieces of the Randolph period."
32. The cover of the novel, when it was published in book form, included a raised illustration which had the title in a circle which rests upon a solitary rose. Two leaves from the flower reach up to support the globe-like burden, and the blossom itself bends forward under the weight. The emblem is appropriate to a work in which Rose Fletcher tries to take social burdens off the natural impulses. She is more successful than others in the novel who remain overburdened by the world.
33. Mary Wilkins Freeman, The Shoulders of Atlas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1908), p. 160. All page references included in the text of the dissertation are from this edition. 104
She, like Arabella, has that quality which Freeman sees lacking in most
New Englanders, the ability to receive easily and graciously. For
Freeman, such an ability is not only admirable, but it has a two-fold
importance. If one can receive freely from others who give freely, one
will also find it easier to receive and act upon internal demands without 7 J being overburdened by a sense of guilt or discomfort. Thus, for
example, Rose pursues the human need for touch, a process of giving and
receiving, and a need poorly satisfied in a region where demonstrative- ness is discouraged.
Rose tries to reach Horace Allen, her reluctant lover, who believes in the mind more than in the emotions. Rose, on the other hand,
is comfortable with feelings: "Her emotions were so healthy that she had the power to keep them under the wings of her spirit, both to guard and hold the superior place" (p. 213). The couple spends an evening during which Horace thinks of how the moon has, over the years, shone down on scenes of deprivation and death: the pyramids, the battle-fields of the
Old Testament, the children of Israel in their bondage. Rose, on the other hand, has been thinking about the desirability of touch, and replies to Horace about how the moon "shone upon the Garden of Eden after Adam had so longed for Eve that she grew out of his longing and became some thing separate from himself, so that he could see her without seeing
34. The need to receive, implicit throughout Freeman's writing, becomes a dominant theme in her final volume, Edgewater People (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1918). See, for example, "Value Received," "The Outside of the House," and "The Ring with the Green Stone," all stressing a person's receiving graciously from others. 105 himself all the time; and it shone upon the garden in Solomon's Song, and the roses of Sharon, and the lilies of the valley, and the land flowing with milk and honey" (p. 166). Rose is not interested in things absent, but with things immediate, not with exile but promise and fulfillment.
She eventually converts Horace, who moves beyond a life of bookish denial to an acceptance of immediate fullness.
The rose in Freeman's writings, it should be concluded, symbolizes a state of instinctive action originating in the human unconscious. She realizes, however, how the mind, through its creation of behavioral precepts, impedes such instinctiveness. Even in her later works, as contrived as the situations often are, unconscious behavior is never allowed to function in a pure state. Such purity is reserved for animals, although even they often come under the dominance of the human 35 will. In a world of "circumstances," therefore, Freeman sees the need for a renewability which will keep such circvunstances from becoming rigid modes of response. Freeman ties renewal closely to understanding, particularly an understanding of the dynamics of failure. As we have seen in Chapter One, Freeman saw that the Salem hysteria was abetted by faulty perception throughout the community. We have also seen her lilac figures undergo emotional failures as a result of perceptual inadequacy.
Thus, in a number of her works, Freeman introduces characters closely associated with the lily, her flower of regeneration. At times such
35. See the Understudies collection for a number of sketches displaying animal instinct, and particularly how such instincts are tampered with by man. Good examples are "The Monkey," "The Squirrel," and "The Doctor's Horse." 106 figures come to understandings which free them from harmful life-styles; at other times they are catalysts for the re-awakening of others.
In "A New England Nun," for example, Joe Dagget, because of his old promise, seems doomed to accommodate himself to the neatly ordered world of Louisa Ellis. Joe plods on toward a marriage neither of them wants, but he is compelled by duty and honor. Dagget is a perceptive man in many ways, a figure of "good humored sense and shrewdness." He realizes that Louisa's dog is not something ferocious, but rather a poor creature enfeebled by his bondage. Joe sees how the repression of Caesar by Louisa makes the dog seem fiercer than he actually is. Yet Joe does not see how an abstraction, which has endured over fourteen years in his own case, need not be a repressive absolute fiercer than it actually is.
Joe and Louisa are both freed to follow their own inclinations by
Lily Dyer. Lily unwittingly causes a realization in the other two that nothing abstract is unalterable. Lily herself is a figure of natural rather than abstract power -- "a girl tall and full-figured with a firm, fair face, looking fairer and firmer in the moonlight, her strong yellow hair braided in a close knot. A girl full of calm rustic strength and bloom, with a masterful way which might have beseemed a princess." She seems a perfect mate for Joe Dagget, but Joe, who feels as if he were
"surrounded by a hedge of lace," is unable to free himself from his promise to Louisa. He is finally freed, however, when Louisa overhears his confession of love to Lily. Louisa realizes both she and Joe have been enacting a lie, and she is only too glad to permit Joe to pursue the truth of his feelings. She returns with her inhibitions to her cloistered 107 life and allows Joe to follow his instincts. The action completes what is essentially a parable of impulses cut loose from inhibition when abstraction gives way to the truths of nature.
Lily Almy is the niece of Fidelia Almy, the "patient waiter" met earlier. An orphan, Lily has waited with her aunt for the return of
Ansel Lennox, who had gone west forty years before. Throughout her childhood Lily has
watched her aunt start forth on her daily pilgrimage to the post- office, with the confident expectation that one of these days she would return with a letter from Mr. Lennox. She regarded that sacred loaf of plum-cake which was always kept on hand, and believed that he might appear to dispose of it at any moment. She had the sincerest faith that the time was coming when the herb medicine would quiet poor Fidelia's tremulous head, when the sage tea would turn all grey hairs gold, and the dew would make her yellow, seamy cheeks smooth and rosey, when she would put on that magnificent black silk or that dainty girlish muslin, and sit in the parlor with Mr. Lennox, and have the covers off the chairs, and the mantel-piece blooming with flowers (pp. 408-9).
Having known nothing to dissuade her, and having grown up with Fidelia's emotional derangment, Lily quite naturally yields her faith to that protracted unreality. Lily thereby approaches the danger of making
Fidelia's failure her own.
Only when Lily falls in love does she begin to recognize the pathos of her aunt. When she feels the stirring of emotion within her she begins to sense how thoroughly deluded Fidelia is. "It was hardly until she was a woman herself, and had a lover of her own. It is possible that he gave the final overthrow to her faith, that it had not entirely vanished before." Having felt something real within herself, Lily is able to put into perspective that area of unreality which has harmed
Fidelia. "No, she ain't crazy," Lily explains to her lover; "she's 108
rational enough about everything else. All the way I can put it is, she's
just been pointed one way all her life, and going one way, and now she's
getting nearer the end of the road, she's pointed sharper and she's going
faster. She's had a hard time."
Renewal is again closely associated with the dispelling of
illusion in "Calla-Lilies and Hannah" (A New England Nun). Hannah Redman
has been accused of stealing from the richest citizen of a small village,
and her refusal to tell the truth — that the man's son had taken the
money before leaving the region -- leads to her ostracism by the
community. Hannah almost dies from her suppression of the truth, and
only the return of love from the man she has suffered for, and his
admission to the village that he had taken the money which was rightfully his in the first place, frees the truth and resurrects Hannah's reputation.
The portrait of Lily Jennings in "The Copy-Cat" provides an interesting progression to the lily motif. The reality of Lily contra dicts first appearances. On the surface Lily is quite the spoiled child.
She is the perfect picture of little-girl prettiness, and seems vapid at best. At first glance her relationship to regeneration is a superficial one, seen only in her pretty clothes which are "renewed every year."
Lily even seems to be a bad influence on the plain-looking, but trusting
Amelia Wheeler. Amelia identifies strongly with Lily, who in turn leads her copy-cat admirer into mischievous situations. And yet, as Freeman points out, Lily's mischief is innocent enough, and the problems resulting for Amelia are unintentional: "Lily, being on the whole a very normal 109 little girl, and not disposed to even a full estimate of herself as com pared with others of her sex, did not dream of Amelia's adoration." Her unself-consciousness is, in fact, quite like that of Freeman's rose- women.
The reality belying appearances is illustrated sharply when Lily causes Amelia to switch places with her so that she, Lily, can leave her house one night. When Amelia is caught she seems at last the victim of her idol. Yet the incident causes a new awareness in Amelia's mother as she realizes why her daughter, sent to school in non-descript clothes, has turned to Lily to establish an identity. Thereafter, Amelia "went to school 'dressed like the best,' and her mother petted her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet." Moreover, "It was not very long after ward that Amelia, out of her own improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality." Thus, while "The Copy-Cat" seems on the one hand a story about superficiality triumphing over the Yankee virtue of simplicity, Freeman instructs the reader that there are times when little changes can aid in the creation of a new self-image. Like all of
Freeman's renewal figures, Lily is instrumental in opening the eyes and mind to a fuller sense of human possibilities. 36 Several other Freeman works illustrate that if, as critics say, one of her basic themes is revolt, such revolutions are generally percep tual. Enabled to see things they have not noticed before, persons
36. See Westbrook, Freemans pp. 62-65; Pattee, Sidelights, p. 207; and Herron, p. 92. Babette May Levy, "Mutations in New England Local Color," New England Quarterly, 19 (1946), p. 355, criticizes the rebellions in Freeman for being too often unconvincing. 110
achieve personal regeneration by overthrowing old patterns of behavior.
For example, Nicholas Gunn, in "A Solitary" (A New England Nun), is freed
from his harsh isolation by reaching out to help another. He discovers
that "There is a higher congeniality than that of mutual understanding;
there is that of need and supply." Mrs. Wilson Tory, in "An Old
Arithmetician" (A Humble Romance), finally realizes that there is a danger
in being too preoccupied with abstractions. "It don't make no difference,"
she pronounces after her discovery, "what folks are bom with a faculty
for — whether it's cipherin1, or singin1, or writin' poetry — the love
that's betwixt human beings an' the help that's betwixt 'em ought to come
first." Mrs. Muzzy recovers from a succession of deaths in her family in
"A Tardy Thanksgiving" (A Humble Romance) by realizing that human friend
ship is something worth being thankful for. In "Up Primrose Hill" (A New
England Nun), two young lovers discover in old Maria Primrose the folly
of marrying for anything but love. They are enlightened as they see
Maria returning home after the end of a unsuccessful marriage which had
been undertaken for social gain. She returns to "pass the remainder of
her life in lonely and unavailing regret and a dullness which was not
peace." Lois Field, the daughter of Jane Field, learns from watching her 37 mother how an over-active conscience can lead to insanity. Ironically,
37. Mrs. Field is a good example of what Austin Warren calls the "sick conscience" which appears so often in Freeman characters. "The sick conscience," he says, "is rigid, inflexible, tries to reduce all morality . . . to a single principle; rejects consequences, seen or foreseen as part of the moral act; admits no 'mixed motives,' even though benevolence be one; is disposed to confuse virtue with merit" (The New England Conscience, p. 15). Ill
Lois' reaction against her mother's obsessiveness is initiated in a cemetery, where she discovers the love of Francis Arms: "Some of the old uncared-for graves were covered with rank growths of grass and weeds, which seemed fairly instinct with merry life this summer afternoon.
Crickets and cicadas trilled through them; now and then a bird flew up.
It was like a resurrection stir." Christopher Dodd, in "The Balking of
Christopher" (The Copy-Cat), flees for a time from the "responsibilities" of life to rediscover himself in the solitude of a mountain cabin. As he says, "I have tried to do my duties, but I believe sometimes duties act on the soul like weeds on a flower." Christopher's journey to the
"spiritual open" leads him for the first time to sense he is "something more than just a man." In the presence of nature he rises above his old view of himself as a failure. He says, while looking at a grove of sugar maples, "See the pink on their young leaves! They know more than you and
I. They know how to grow young every spring."
The most bizarre resurrection in Freeman is that of Abel Edwards, the father of Jerome. Old Edwards returns to his home fourteen years after he has been presumed to have drowned himself in a bottomless pond called "Dead Hole." Upon his return, Abel explains his realization, at the time of his disappearance, that his life had been a plodding one: "I couldn't earn enough to get ahead nohow. I was nothin' but a drag on you all, nothin' but a drag." Abel has freed himself from the possible shame of a mortgage foreclosure to "get a chance." He has refused to acquiesce, even though his desertion has seemed dishonorable. When he returns, and sits in the place of honor at a kind of anti-funeral gathering which
Freeman calls his "resurrection," his appearance announces his strange 112
regeneration: "Abel Edwards, from being a reserved man, with the self-
contentment of one who is buffeted by unfair odds of fate, yet will not
stoop to vain appeals, but holds always to the front his face of dumb
dissent and purpose, was become a garrulous and happy child" (p. 442).
Abel has rejected the peace of defeat of Sylvia Crane and others, and his
ability to rise above pride prefigures the renewal of Jerome at the end
of the novel.
Freeman's finest study of regeneration is also the one which was,
according to Blanche Colton Williams, "the story for which, out of all 38 she has written, Mrs. Freeman has an expressed predilection." A story
of exquisite artistry, "Evelina's Garden" (Silence and Other Stories—
1898) is not only a resurrection piece, it combines resurrection with a
depiction of emotional failure in a manner unsurpassed in Freeman's writings.
The study of failure is Evelina Adams, the daughter of the town's
wealthiest man, yet a man who enjoyed life minimally. When he dies, the
reaction of the community reflects .his lack of interaction with others.
"There was not much active grief for him in the village; he had really figured therein more as a stately monument of his own grandeur than anything else. He had been a man of little force of character, and that
little had seemed to degenerate since his wife died. An inborn dignity of manner might have served to disguise his weakness with any others than
38. Williams, pp. 168-69. 113 39 these shrewd New Englanders, but they read him rightly." Being the offspring of such social eminence, regardless of its transparency, has worked against Evelina's development as a woman. The young men of the town were uneasy in her presence, and were driven off by the artificial dictates against the mingling of social classes: "The simple young men of the countryside were at once attracted and intimidated by her. They cast fond sly glances across the meeting-house at her lovely face, but they were confused before her when they jostled her in the doorway and the rose and lavender scent of her lady garments came in their faces"
(P. 116). Evelina's natural beauty has been obviated by her background.
Evelina's single and decisive emotional crisis occurs during one such sabbath. She has returned to her hometown after an education in the kind of finishing school young Mary Wilkins had found so distasteful.
For a moment, Evelina exchanges a glance with a young man in the meeting house, "and it was for a second as if her own heart leaped to the surface." The two are caught for an instant by the interchange of eyes; but finally "a pallor crept over Evelina's delicately brilliant face.
She turned it away, and her curls falling softly from under the green wreath on her bonnet brim hid it." The pair never acts upon what has been felt at that moment. The man, Thomas Merriam, marries a woman with whom he settles down to a life of secure boredom. Evelina retreats to a life of peeping at Merriam through the shutters of her house.
39. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], Silence and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898), pp. 119-20. All page references included in the text of the dissertation are from this edition. 114
Shortly after Merriam's wedding, Evelina begins her garden. The garden is a common motif throughout nineteenth-century New England literature, from that of Rappacini and the Pyncheons to the herb-garden of Almira Todd. Often such gardens are used by the writer as a psycho
logical landscape. For Evelina Adams, the garden is a surrogate lover.
With a name suggesting the parents of mankind, Evelina tries to create her own little Eden to compensate for her loss. Behind a hedge which becomes more and more insulating as the years go by, she tries to estab lish a pristine domain but she succeeds primarily in creating a shrine to her New England heritage.
There had never been in the village such a garden as this of Evelina Adams'. All the old blooms which had come over the seas with the early colonists, and started as it were their own colony of flora in the new country, flourished there. The naturalized pinks and phlox and hollyhocks and the rest, changed a little in color and fragrance by the conditions of a new climate and soil, were all in Evelina's garden, and no one dreamed what they meant to Evelina; and she did not drearo herself, for her heart was always veiled to her own eyes, like the face of a nun. The roses and pinks, the poppies and heart's-ease, were to this maiden-woman, who had innocently and helplessly outgrown her maiden heart, in the place of all the loves of life which she had missed. Her affections had forced an outlet in roses; they exhaled sweetness in pinks, and twined and clung in honeysuckle- vines. The daffodils, when they came up in the spring, comforted her like the smiles of children; when she saw the first rose, her heart leaped as at the face of a lover.
She had lost the one way of human affection, but her feet had found a little single side-track of love which gave her still a zest in the journey of life (pp. 123-24).
One notes that the garden is sewn with the flowers brought by the early- settlers with their dreams and hopes of a triumphant new world. But now, for Evelina, these flowers of heritage are a digression from the fuller possibilities of life. Like Caroline Munson's, Evelina's life is one of embalmment. Her house "seemed laid away in rose leaves and lavender" 115
(p. 125). Evelina ages "peacefully behind her green hedge," but she has been defeated by her culture's inability to separate emotions from the traditional conception of man's fallen state. She is trapped by a false
Eden, and exists apart from the emotional reality she momentarily experienced.
An alternative is offered to the type of surrender to ritual which Evelina has made. As she has in "A Patient Waiter," Freeman intro duces a younger counterpart of her spinster. Like Lily Almy, Evelina
Leonard, a second cousin of the elder Evelina, is exposed to the danger of lapsing into the life-style of her influential elder. Young Evelina begins to show signs of spiritual retreat after her arrival at her cousin's. She even begins to wear lavender clothes. Like her cousin,
Evelina Leonard experiences a ripple of love during an exchange of glances which both potential lovers are unwilling to pursue. The man is the son of Thomas Merriam, and has recently become the village preacher.
Thoughts about Evelina Leonard pester young Merrian as those about the elder Evelina have his father. In particular, the second
Evelina is a challenge to the strictures of Merriam's religion. "Always as the young minister bent over his sermon paper, laboriously tracing out with a sputtering quill his application of the articles of the orthodox faith, Evelina's blue eyes seemed to look out at him between the stern doctrines like the eyes of an angel" (p. 145). On another occasion, in the presence of Evelina Leonard, "all his ministerial state fell from him like an outer garment of his soul" (p. 133). Without her knowing it, young Evelina, through her tacit appeal to the natural man in Merriam, is 116 a direct threat to his cultural and religious heritage, and comes in conflict with it as her cousin has done.
Young Tom Merriam is a firm adherent to duty. The old spinster dies, leaving everything to the young Evelina on condition that she never marry, and never let the garden fall into disorder. Evelina Adams has not only left her wealth, but has apparently left her life-time of inhibitions to her heir. Thomas, glancing down from the pulpit sometime after the bequest is revealed to Evelina Leonard, notices how "weary- looking and thin she was growing. And her bright color was well-nigh gone, and there were pitiful downward lines at the corners of her sweet mouth. Poor young Evelina was fading like one of her own flowers, as if 40 some celestial gardener had failed in his care of her" (p. 171).
Thomas, the one person who can bring instinctive meaning to Evelina's life, remains constricted by his training. Dutifully, and understandably, he refuses to jeopardize the inheritance through thoughts of marriage.
His father points out to him that "Duty can get to be an idol of wood and stone;" and Evelina even writes a letter of reconciliation to Thomas, which would apparently absolve him of any blame if their love was to flourish. Yet the young minister remains one who "when he had once
40. The description sounds intriguingly like that of the author herself at this time. Pictures of the writer, such as that on the soft- cover edition of Westbrook's Freeman, show the distinctly down-turned corners of her mouth. The nineties, while replete with literary successes, had been full of personal low points for Freeman. Hanson Tyler, her own Thomas Merriam, had married early in the decade; and by the time of Silence, and due to a number of causes explained on pages 140 and 141 of Foster, the writer had developed a mild dependence on a powerful sedative. 117
fairly laid hold of duty" tended to "grasp it hard, although it might be
to his own pain and death, and maybe to that of others" (p. 177).
The pain of that "other," however, finally causes Evelina to
rebel against such inherited orthodoxies as both she and Thomas serve
under. She performs the ultimate sacrilege to her inheritance, the
destruction of the garden. Through this act, through the ruination of
the solitary pseudo-Eden, Evelina defies the fate of her dead cousin and
attempts to embrace the present.
The act turns out, in a sense, to have been foreseen by the elder
Evelina, who has apparently died with few illusions about how wasted her
life has been. She has arranged her will so that her younger relative
would actually have to revolt to benefit from it. The heir would have to
achieve her own awareness about the fundamental priorities of life and,
equally as important, she would have to act in response to that awareness.
In the forfeiture envelope, containing the name "Thomas Merriam," the old
spinster has written: "This do I in the hope and belief that neither the greed of riches nor the fear of them shall prevent that which is good
and wise in the sight of the Lord, and with the surety that a love which shall triumph over so much in its way shall endure, and shall be a
blessing and not a curse to my beloved cousin, Evelina Leonard."
"Evelina's Garden" is artistically contrived in some ways,
particularly in the duplication of the two Evelina-Merriam relationships.
Yet such contrivances seem appropriate enough in a work so strongly
concerned with inexorabilities which move from generation to generation. 118
And while the inheritance device seems a literary gimmick,^ it provokes a remarkable thematic appropriateness. In her depiction of Evelina Adams1 bequest, Freeman makes the spinster party to both failure and renewal.
She is like the emotions, or the instincts themselves. As we have seen throughout Freeman, emotional repression, caused by so many different elements of heritage, leads to failure -- sometimes sustaining but never fulfilling. At the same time, emotional response, and the heeding of instinct, can create an enriching sense of the present. Which of the two directions an individual takes seems, in Freeman, to hinge upon an under standing of externals, and whether a response has an inner or outer utility. Evelina Adams has meticulously arranged her will so that if either Tom Merriam or Evelina Leonard defy their external strictures, the will will be broken and, in reality, fulfilled. Evelina's will, like the obsessive human will pursuing dogged routines in the wake of emotional failure, is most rewarding when abandoned.
Thus, Freeman constantly questioned codes of behavior imposed upon individuals. In "Evelina's Garden" she showed social and religious tenets as impediments to human happiness. As Chapter Four will show,
Freeman, like Jewett, challenged a wide range of human orthodoxies, asking whether sanction by time was sufficient reason for allowing the
"contrivances of man" to intensify the barrenness of so many lives.
41. An inheritance device appears in Jerome, though it seems an even more incredible intrusion upon the plot than that in "Evelina's Garden." 119
In some ways, Freeman and Jewett approached their depiction of regional failure differently. As we have already noted, Jewett had the greater sense of distance, of detachment. In this connection, one notices a greater use of humor in Jewett's writings than in all but the very latest efforts of Freeman. The sense of irony, the moments of satire, have in Jewett's work the greater crispness one would expect from a person who had the wider perspectives. Freeman more often showed the cynicism, the sarcasm, of one who had felt confinements more immediately.
Overall, the more detached Jewett gave a stronger sense of the outer workings of the decline, that is, its historical context, even its connection to western culture as a whole. Freeman's orientation was more internal. She knew the old strictures more intimately and as a conse quence dealt more with repression, with the agony of sexual and emotional denial. As a consequence, Freeman's works contain eruptive moments when denial and inner demand come together. Jewett's characters are as inextricably trapped, but are pictured in a different way. They seem to float vacantly, to be suspended in a limbo-world like that in Littlepage's
Hudson Bay vision. But if Jewett's characters on the whole feel a sense of affliction less, they also struggle less. Fewer free themselves.
Jewett's world seems less fragmented. The pattern of failure is more consistent.
Yet both Freeman and Jewett concur in their depiction of New
England in their day as a region cut off from its instincts by its orthodoxies and institutions. Both saw a society in which self-trust had been overwhelmed by beliefs and customs for so long that New Englanders 120 turned even more fiercely away from instinct in times of instability.
Both Jewett and Freeman warned against such a retreat in their writings.
But to reinforce their warning, they coupled their pictures of the consequences of retreat with a wholesale exposure of how unsatisfactory as havens were many of the supposedly stabilizing elements of the culture. CHAPTER FOUR
THE CHALLENGE TO ORTHODOXY
To speak of the ritualization which beset the New Englanders of
Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman is really to speak of a double-level of orthodoxy: personal and cultural. As Chapter One has shown, both writers had an historical awareness of a regional tendency to adopt rigid patterns of behavior in times of failure or uncertainty.
Such a response could, in the judgment of Freeman at least, lead to such extremes as wide-spread persecution and torture. Chapters Two and Three have dealt with individuals who adopt private orthodoxies in the after math of personal and regional failure. George Quint and Barnabas Thayer bind themselves to personal vows which become more important than the well-being of themselves and others; Joanna Todd moves relentlessly along a chosen path of si CM suicide, denying the possibility of starting again;
Louisa Ellis builds her emotional fears into a religion of thimbles and aprons. Grudges are perpetuated, ideas left unchallenged, and failures submitted to. Consistently, the end-product of such patterns of response is self-denial. Jewett captured the fabric of this denial syndrome in a description of her rustics from "A Bit of Shore Life" (Old Friends and
New).
I wonder if any one has not often been struck, as I have, by the sadness and hopelessness which seems to overshadow many of the people who live on the lonely farms in the outskirts of small New England villages. It is most noticeable among the elderly women. Their talk is very cheerless, and they have a moibid
121 122
interest in sicknesses and deaths; they tell each other long stories about such things; they are very forlorn; they dwell persistently upon any troubles which they have; and their petty disputes with each other have a tragic hold upon their thoughts, sometimes being handed down from one generation to the next. Is it because their world is so small, and life affords so little amusement and pleasure, and is at best such a dreary round of the dullest housekeeping? There is a lack of real merriment, and the fun is an odd, rough way of joking; it is a stupid, heavy sort of fun, though there is much of a certain quaint humor, and once in a while a flash of wit.
She is saddened that her country-folk achieve their greatest satisfactions from ceremoniously dwelling upon their infirmities and vulnerabilities, and that they create destructive orthodoxies, as petty as a family dispute given from "one generation to the next," which are as binding as the routines which entrap those rustics.*
As we have begun to discover in earlier chapters, it was evident to Jewett and Freeman that the tendency to generate personal rituals of behavior was reinforced by the New England culture as a whole. They saw their region as one in which customs, teachings, conventions and social patterns had achieved a level of authority proportionate to the mistrust of self-discovery inherited from the Puritans. The New Englander was used to being guided by well-established ways which minimized the needcfor
1. Jewett illustrates the New England tendency to perpetuate feuds in "Miss Debby's Neighbors" (The Mate of the Daylight), where a feud seems "to come down from generation to generation like a -- curse!" A feud affecting younger generations is also basic to "Law Lane" (The King of Folly Island). An interesting comparison is her story "Bold Words at the Bridge" (The Queen's Twin), in which two immigrants from Ireland find it easier than their New England counterparts to swallow their pride and admit that friendship is more important than hastily made vows. 123
instinctive responses. "What the Puritan does insist on," wrote Perry
Miller, "is that the natural man, if left to himself, will not read the
lessons of nature and reason correctly." 2 In conjunction with such a
view of man, and certainly in part because of a need to fashion a
cohesive, disciplined society, Puritanism, as Clarence Faust puts it,
"undertook to direct all human institutions and activities." 3 The
seventeenth-century manifestations of this outlook and approach are well
known. But to a great many New Englanders of the nineteenth century, the
Puritan ways were not historical facts; they were still controlling
principles. Unitarianism and Transcendentalism had touched parts of New
England, but in the back-country and small towns that Jewett and Freeman
knew, the old ways were still in operation.
In her 1899 preface to Pembroke, Freeman wrote of how her New
Englander, like the Puritan before him, simply did not understand his
right to, and the possibility of, inner fullness:
There is often to a mind from the outside world an almost repul sive narrowness and a pitiful sordidness which amounts to tragedy in the lives of such people as those portrayed in Pembroke, but quite generally the tragedy exists only in the comprehension of the observer and not at all in that of the observed. The pitied would meet pity with resentment, they would be full of wonder and wrath if told that their lives were narrow since they have never seen the limit of the breadth of their current of daily life. A singing school is as much to them as a symphony concert and grand opera to their city brethern, and a sewing church sociable as an afternoon tea. Though the standard of taste of the simple villagers and their complete satisfaction therewith may reasonably be lamented, as also their restricted view of life, they are not to be pitied, generally speaking, for
2. Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson, ed., The Puritans (New York: American Book Co., 1938), p. 52.
3. Faust, p. 4. 124
their urihappiness in consequence. It may be that the lack of unhappiness constitutes the real tragedy.4
The tragedy, as we have seen with so many of her characters, is one of
perception. Thus, both she and Jewett tried, in their writings, to
re-establish some sense of perspective. Ttiey coupled their depiction of
personal failure with an attack on institutions to try to shake a
seemingly mindless adherence to all things which were well-established,
an adherence made even firmer by the problems of the day.
At times, the author's examinations of New England custom are
gentle. For example, in The Jamesons, her almost forgotten work of the
nineties, Freeman uses a questionable protagonist to intrude upon many of
the cherished patterns of a Vermont village. Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson,
who moves to the village from New York City, in effect tries to become an
institution herself in her new community. She is virtually oppressive at
times as she dominates the sewing circles and the literary society with health foods and Browning.
At the same time, Freeman stands behind Mrs. Jameson as the out sider challenges the excessive New England formality and preoccupation with death. During one crusade, Mrs. Jameson tries to overturn the
regional habit of using front doors only for special occasions. She
"resolved to do away with this sacred state of things, and also with our
sacred estimate of the best parlors, which were scarcely opened from one
year's end to the other, and seemed redolent of past grief and joy, with
4. Pembroke, ed. Westbrook, p. 35. 125
no dilution by the every day occurences of life."** As we have seen, the
best parlor was for the New England writer a stark representation of the
way in which the Yankee was unable to mix the more crucial events of life
with the matter-of-fact happenings. Thus death and love and marriage
were excised from the normal rounds of life, a process which worked in
large measure to cause in the New Englander an inability to deal effec
tively with the unusual, the profoundly emotional, or the cataclysmic --
except in stylized ways. When Mrs. Jameson continues to insist upon
entering and leaving through her neighbors' front doors, and to sit in
their best parlors, Freeman is quietly prodding the New Englander into
allowing an easier mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary.^
Mrs. Jameson also confronts the funereal preoccupations of the
villagers. "In many of our village parlors," the narrator explains,
"sometimes in the guest-chambers, where there had been deaths in the
family, hung the framed coffin-plates and faded funeral wreaths of wool
flowers, a triumph of domestic art, which encircled the coffin-plate
instead of the original funeral garland. Mrs. Jameson set herself to work to abolish this grimly pathetic New England custom with all her
might. She did everything but actually tear them from our walls"
5. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman]. The Jamesons (New York: Doubleday and McClure Company, 1899), p. 126. All page references, included in the text of dissertation, are from this edition.
6. See also "Little Margaret Snell: The Village Runaway" in The People of Our Neighborhood (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Co., 1898). A little girl creates a stir through a town by insistently walking in unannounced on formal occasions. 126 7 (p. 128). Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson is not the kind of liberator one easily identifies with; but in attacking morbidity she seems to be enacting resentments which survived from the days of Freeman's repressive upbringing.
Both Freeman and Jewett, however, see the little death customs as part of larger religious attitudes. Both are sharply critical of insen sitive religion and its practitioners. They present religious absolutism as one of the major causes of stultification in New England. Religion too often had form, but no soul. The Puritan system of black and white morality, of negativism, survived into the nineteenth century, shorn of spiritual direction. By the time of Freeman and Jewett it had become, as g Kenneth Murdock puts it, a tradition of "hollow conformity." We have already seen the Reverend Mr. Dimmick's empty, callous religiosity in The
Country of the Pointed Firs, as his presence underscores a major reason behind Joanna Todd's suicide. And we have seen Thomas Merriam, in
"Evelina's Garden," as servant to a bookish, unresponsive religious outlook.
7. Other Freeman stories further her attack on funereal obsessiveness. See "The Poetess," in which the title figure composes mawkish funeral poems, or "A Souvenir," in which the author illustrates the custom of making floral wall-hangings from the hair of the dead.
8. Murdock, p. 269. 127
Jewett and Freeman, in fact, almost never show clergymen in an g admirable light. Most frequently their ministers are weak, introverted, inflexible, and unfeeling. Helen Vernon, in Jewett's "Martha's Lady"
(The Queen's Twin), mimics the local pastor for his overbearing sobriety.
Jewett also contrasts the industrious, self-reliant Eliza Peck of "Miss
Peck's Promotion" (The King of Folly Island) with the self-pitying
Reverend Elbury. Miss Peck, who takes care of the pastor after his wife's death, grows to realize that "Mr. Elbury's loss was not so great as she had at first sympathetically believed; she knew that his romantic, ease- loving, self-absorbed, and self-admiring nature had been curbed and held in check by the literal, prosaic, faithful-in-little-things disposition of his dead wife. She was self-denying, he was self-indulgent; she was dutiful, while he was given to indolence — and the unfounded plea of ill-health made his only excuse." The minister is, Miss Peck realizes, a weak creature hiding behind an institutional veneer, a man who "depended
9. There are exceptions -- primarily in Jewett, and primarily in her rather stylized holiday pieces. Jewett's most sympathetically treated minister is Darley in "The First Sunday in June," Independent, 49 (November 4, 1897) -- and in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 257-64. See also "Miss Manning's Minister," Independent, 35 (August 23, 1883), 1082- 84 — in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 81-90; and "Mrs. Parkin's Christmas Eve," Ladies Home Journal, 8 (December, 1890), 1-2; (January, 1891), 5 -- in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 146-57. At times, Jewett, like Stowe, seems strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism, and portrays priests in a very positive way. In "The Foreigner," for example, Mrs. Todd says of one priest, "He was a kind-hearted old man; he looked so benevolent an' fatherly I could ha' stopped an' told him my own troubles," The World of Punnet Landing: A Sarah Ome Jewett Collection, ed. David Green (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 274. Compare this description to that of Dimmick. 128 upon his calling rather than upon his own character and efforts." Not surprisingly, then, Elbury is a preacher of "flowery and inconsequent sermons."
The abundance of such ministerial types as Elbury and Dimmick leads Mrs. Goodsoe, an early version of Almira Todd, to proclaim in "The
Courting of Sister Wisby" (The King of Folly Island): "Sunday keepin' 's all gone out o1 fashion. Some lays it to one thing an' some another, but some o' them old ministers that folks are all a-sighin1 to did preach a lot o' stuff that wa'n't nothin' but cha-ff. 'T wa'n't the work o* God out o' either Old Testament or New. But everybody went to meetin' and heard it, and come home, and was set to fightin' with their next door neighbor over it. Now I'm a believer, and I try to live a Christian life, but I'd as soon hear a surveyor's book read out, figger's an' all, as try to get any simple truth out o' most sermons."*0 The late nineteenth century saw a severe testing of religious belief by economic, social and ethical changes throughout the country, and, by means of Mrs. Goodsoe,
Jewett warns her own region against being too quick about turning thoughtlessly to the old-time religion.
Freeman's ministers are generally as vapid as Jewett's. Solomon
Wells, in Jerome, "fairly walked his road of life attached with invisible leading-strings to Doctor Seth Prescott," the town's wealthiest citizen.
10. Stowe portrayed some of the old ministers whom Jewett refers to through Mrs. Goodsoe. Noteworthy are Dr. Hopkins, a revered but ineffectual clergyman who is the title-figure of The Minister's Wooing; and the fiery Dr. Stem in Oldtown Folks. See also "The Minister's Housekeeper" in Sam Lawson's Fireside Tales, which has strong parallels to "Miss Peck's Promotion." Mrs. Stowe was, of course, a strong literary influence on Jewett. 129
Wells is a mouthpiece for the system of economic oppression Freeman would
attack throughout Jerome. Parson Lord, from the title story in The Love
of Parson Lord (1900), is shown, like other ministers of the regionalists,
to be an ineffectual, detached father.**" He is father in name only to his
daughter, Love, and sees her solely at mealtime. "The rest of the time he
remained alone in his study, walled in, as it were, with the thoughts of
dead divines and fathers of the Church in mummy-cases of old calf-skin,
and was in sore labor over his many headed sermons." Through her delib
erate choices of names, Freeman presents the parson as an objectification of a religion which is so immersed in abstractions that it gives only
cursory attention to love.
The Reverend Mr. Barnes and Mrs. Barnes in Pembroke epitomize what in Freeman comes at times to be almost a contempt for the clergy.
At the time of Rebecca Thayer's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and her turning to them for comfort, the minister and his wife are similarly ineffectual.
"They looked much alike: the minister's small, pale, peaked face peered with anxious solicitude between the folds of the great green scarf which he tied over his cap, and his wife looked like him out of her great wadded green silk hood." Even in the way they are dressed, they appear to peep
at the world, unwilling to confront it on its most basic levels. The wife is beseiged by her New England training as they go to meet Rebecca:
"Her heart beat loudly in her ears, her little thin hands were cold in
11. In Alice Brown, for example, one might point to "Bankrupt," in which Dorcas True is unable to escape the influence of her simple- minded minister-father. In the same Meadow-Grass volume, Brown again criticizes Parson True for his lack of sympathy for another in "At Sudleigh Fair." 130 her great muff. She had married very young, out of a godly New England minister's home. She had never known anything like this before, and a sort of general shame of feminity seemed to be upon her." The Reverend and Mrs. Barnes shrink before Rebecca's "sin," and the girl has to be helped finally by old Mrs. Sloan, whose home is criticized by the inhabitants of Pembroke for its uncleanliness. Yet beneath the surface, her sense of charity contrasts sharply with the inability to give of the 12 superficially correct Barneses.
Aside from displaying hollow ministers, Freeman also shows reli gion as it can affect the parishioners, making them painfully conven tionalized in their own right. We have already seen the religiously- induced longing for death in the Brown sisters of "A Far-Away Melody."
In other Freeman works their type of personal destructiveness becomes a force which cripples others when a religious adherent becomes too piously inflexible. In "A Modern Dragon" (A Humble Romance), for instance,
David Ayre's mother is described as "a very devout woman." Yet her devotion leads her to threaten her son with her own death if he marries
Almira King, the daughter of a spiritualist. Almira is an early version of Freeman's rose-woman in her acceptance of her own beauty, and her love of pretty, simple things. A "little rose of a girl," she is like Madelon
Hautville in having "not known any better than to begin loving [David] vehemently." Mrs. Ayre's intolerance eventually leads to the death of
Almira's mother, to David's hatred of his own mother, and to a proposal
12. See also the rather self-centered, and ultimately destruc tive minister in "The Poetess," mentioned in Chapter Three. 131 of marriage by David that comes more of guilt than of love. Mrs. Ayre's religiosity is shown to be sharply brutal in the same context with
Almira's simple devotion to human instincts.
Even more terrifying than Mrs. Ayre is Deborah Thayer in 13 Pembroke, whom Horace Spencer Fiske in 1903 called "that she-Puritan."
More recently, Perry Westbrook has termed her "a fearsome personification 14 of the most rigid Puritanism." One suspects the portrait of Deborah
Thayer, more than any other in the novel, led Edwin Arlington Robinson to write of Pembroke, "To the careless modern reader the plot --or rather the plots -- will seem impossible and contrary to human nature; but to one who knows anything about Puritanism the book will be interesting and impressive."*"'
Deborah is an iron-willed figure, full of fury and, often, vengeance. During a psalm-reading in church, "Deborah's blue eyes gleamed with warlike energy as she listened: she confused King David's enemies with those people who crossed her own will" (p. 3). Deborah defies most other emotions, such as fear, pity, and sorrow, which would undercut her facade of scornful stoicism. She "never yielded to any of the vicissitudes of life; she met them in fair fight like enemies, and vanquished them, not with trumpet and spear, but with daily duties. It was a village story how Deborah Thayer cleaned all the windows in the
13. Horace Spencer Fiske, Provincial Types in American Fiction (Chautauqua, N.Y.: Chautauqua Press, 1907), p. 50.
14. Pembroke, ed. Westbrook, p. 13.
15. E. A. Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, ed. Dr. Sutcliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 174. 132 house one afternoon when her first child had died in the morning"
(pp. 95-96).
Deborah's character has had an adverse effect upon her family.
Her husband Caleb has become a cowering man, afraid of nature, and fear ful of her discovery that he likes an occasional good time. The eldest son Barnabas, seen in Chapter Three, is possessed of Deborah's inflexi bility after his quarrel with Charlotte Barnard's father. Deborah's daughter Rebecca, just alluded to, becomes pregnant following a long and concerted effort by her mother to prevent her from seeing William Berry.
In the face of her mother's repi'ession, the illegitimacy seems as much the result of rebellion as it does of a sex-drive. Deborah has tried to discourage her daughter's love for William because of Barnabas' break-up with Charlotte. Deborah has curiously assumed her son's action was the result of original sin, and she apparently fears the same reaction in
Rebecca. The workings of her mother's mind are as perplexing to Rebecca as they are to the reader. "Mother," she protests, "you won't stop my marrying William because Barney won't marry his cousin Charlotte? There ain't any sense in that." Deborah replies with dogmatic resolution,
"I've got my reasons, an' that's enough for you" (p. 148). Her reasons are obviously not enough for Rebecca, who tragically challenges such dogmatism.
Deborah Thayer has an insatiable fear of failing in her own eyes
— and in the eyes of the village -- through the failings of her children.
She never hears the rumors of Rebecca's secret meetings with William.
"Indeed," notes Freeman, "it is doubtful if any woman in the village . . . would have ventured to face Deborah Thayer with this rumor concerning her 133
daughter" (p. 186). And predictably, her first words after discovering
her daughter's pregnancy are simple enough: "Go out of this house."
Rebecca's failure becomes Deborah's failure, unleashing the old Puritan
impulses toward retribution and inflexibility. For Deborah there is never
a question of explanation or forgiveness, only expulsion, as if Rebecca
has become unnatural. After Rebecca has left the house without knowing
where she is going, Deborah retreats into personal habit. She sweeps the
snow that has blown upon the floor through the open door; "she even swept
up the snow off the steps outside, but she never cast a glance up or down
the road. Then she beat the snow off the broom, and went in and locked
the door behind her." Deborah removes herself from the responsibilities
of human love to hide behind surface neatness, as if the work-ethic is
going to make everything right.
In the aftermath of Rebecca's illegitimacy, Deborah doubles her
watch over the soul of her youngest son, Ephraim. An invalid, the child
labors under the scolding voice of his mother; and in the midst of his
physical discomfort, he is forced to cramp his spirit into the confines
of catechism: . . for Deborah held that no labor, however arduous,
which savored of the Word and the Spirit could work him bodily ill"
(p. 217). Ephraim is not allowed to play games or eat an occasional
sweet which would make his existence a bit easier. "Would you have me
let him have his own way if it were for the injury of his soul?" his
mother asks. The pleasures of this world seem so remote, in fact, that
the boy finally begins to dream of something more pleasureable in the
next. As he toils over his catechisms, he concocts a "maudlin hope that 134 he himself might be one of the elect of which they treated, because he was so strenuously deprived of plums in this life, and might therefore reasonably expect his share of them in the life to come" (p. 218).
Such speculations by Ephraim culminate during a bitter winter night on which the youth does, for all purposes, take his own life.
Ephraim for the first time yields to impulsive promptings and takes his brother Barnabas' sled to tackle the great hill where he has heard the voices of other children all winter. The snow shrieks out under his feet as he runs through the bitter-cold darkness — "like a whispering multi tude" of voices which he feels sure will inform his mother of his actions.
He labors for a moment under the pressures of his upbringing, and the heavy dependence upon conscience, but then gives way to "the one unrestrained hilarity of his whole life." He shouts out to the night in his solitude, the author noting how even "his mother would not have recognized his voice had she heard it, for it was the first time that the boy had ever given full cry to the natural voice of youth and his heart"
(p. 229).16
Ephraim's exertions kill him. Unfortunately for Deborah, he dies almost immediately after she spanks him for playing holly-gull with his father. Suddenly her world of black-and-white moral absolutism cracks.
She blames herself for her son's death, denying herself even the satis faction of her house-cleaning rituals. Despite her declining health, she
16. The comparison to Ethan Frome, written almost two decades later, is tempting. One cannot help noticing the similarity of the sledding scenes, each of which is the enactment of a death-wish. And like Frome, Ephraim yields for a moment to "the illusion that he was a free man." 135
resists death for some months until she learns of the sledding, and the
mince pie the boy had stolen when he came home that night. "Oh Lord,"
she exclaims, "I thank thee for letting me know before I die! Maybe I
haven't killed him after all!" She dies, her soul at ease, not
realizing that she has indeed caused her son's death. Through an inten
sification of the kind of will that has aided other New Englanders to
override natural processes in the face of failure, she has defied death
itself until the scales of morality are tipped in her favor. She submits
to death only when the load of culpability, and the probability of
failure, is removed from her.
In "A New England Prophet" (Silence), Freeman shows religion not
only in terms of individual or family implications, but as it can
adversely affect larger numbers of persons if they are willing to blindly
surrender themselves to a leader or a cause. After the confines of the
greater part of his life, and the tedium of his "old worn channel,"
Solomon Lennox takes the leadership of a Millerite type of sect,
continuing a tendency to form splinter religions which had a long history 17 in New England. Freeman's choice of words indicates her severe
criticism of this type of religious demagoguery: "It was as if some
germs of a great spiritual disturbance had sought, through some unknown
medium, this man's mind as their best ripening place." Elsewhere, she sees the Lennox cult as being like the offshoot of a "great physical
malady."
17. For a succinct discussion of splinter religions in New England see Chapter Ten of E. V. Mitchell's It's An Old New England Custom (New York: Bonanza Books, 1946), pp. 151-68. 136
Lennox, who previously "had been a man of few and quiet words,
and who had never expressed his own emotions in public beyond an
inaudible, muttered pray at a conference meeting," directs his appeal to
similarly repressed villagers. His new religion provides a release from their dull lives for many of his neighbors, and they demonstrate how their dullness, how their control by routines, has made them susceptible to his form of external control. During the brief zenith of his ministry,
"the housewives' kitchen tables were piled high with unwashed dishes, the hearths were unswept and the fires low, the pantry shelves were bare, and often the children went to bed with only the terrors of judgment for sustenance."
As the day approaches on which Lennox has predicted the world will end, more and more villagers become infected by the disease.
There was present within the village a spiritual convulsion as real as any other convulsion of nature, and as truly although more subtly felt. Even they who had scoffed and laughed at this new movement from the first, and were now practically untouched by it, grew nervous and ill at ease towards night as from the gathering of a storm. They seemed charged with electricity generated by the touch of human thought and faith with the Unknown. The unbelievers pressed their faces against the window-panes, shading their eyes from the light within as the dusk deepened, or stood out in their yards watching the sky, half fearful they should indeed see some sign or marvel therein (p. 217).
Freeman shows a frightened, sad little group which climbs a hill on an appointed evening to an unfulfilled encounter with divine judgment. In pale garments made for the occasion, they move "silently, crowding each other whitely like a flock of sheep." Their individualism is completely forsaken for the time. They have meekly abandoned it to free themselves from external drudgery, but, ironically, have been betrayed by the external solution to which they have turned. 137
Caught in this almost pathetic movement is Lennox's daughter,
Melissa, who has lost her belief in her self after her father's harrangues. "I am afraid," she tells her lover Isaac Penfield, who tries to counter her father's influence. "My sins are so great, and I cannot hide from the eyes of the Lord." Penfield stands out in strong opposition to Lennox and his followers. He is a young man "radiant with the knowl edge of his own strength" who tries to restore to Melissa her own sense of self-worth. He finally succeeds, pulling her away from the imminent failure of her father and his followers on the night of the anticipated cataclysm. He offers a deep, though clearly secular, alternative to the spiritual shallowness of Lennox. Under a full moon which was no "sign but the old one of eternal love and beauty in the sky," Melissa "looked up in her lover's face, and suddenly it was to her as if she saw therein the new earth of all her dreams."
Thus, in "A New England Prophet," Freeman demonstrates faith in oneself as a strengthening alternative to faith in superficial con- 18 structs. Even Deborah Thayer's faith had not been in herself, but in the catechisms, in teachings, in abstractions like duty and the work- 19 ethic which were so much a part of the religious climate. Without
18. For another contemporary study of demagoguery, see Alice Brown's first novel, The Fools of Nature (Boston: Ticknor § Co., 1887), which deals with fraudulent spiritualism. See also Freeman's "The Squirrel," in Understudies for a parable of how man manages to offset trust in the workings of nature, a trust which the author sees as a beneficial alternative to human "faith."
19. See Austin Warren's New England Saints, p. 3. He speaks of the survival into the present of the way in which the New Englander has "owed obedience first to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; then to Duty, 'stern daughter of the voice of God,' with the conscience as relentless director." 138
self-trust, Deborah, and the followers of Lennox, and so many others in
Jewett and Freeman, become rigidly ineffective as human beings.
Religion, through its failure to face realities, provides, in the judgment of Jewett and Freeman, a metaphysical basis for harmful patterns of thought and action. At the same time, each writer points to social
and economic structures which compliment the spiritual ones in their
opposition to nature. Both question the survival of artificial social
classes. We have already seen the effect of class discrimination upon
Almira Todd and Evelina Adams. Mrs. Todd has come from the working
classes, and Evelina from the aristocracy; but neither has been immune to the old codes which ultimately do not benefit either class.
Jewett anticipated Mrs. Todd's difficulties in a number of earlier works. Persons are trapped by their own class, or the class of
another. "Lady Ferry" (Old Friends and New) depicts an isolated member of the old aristocracy who feels herself cursed with deathlessness. The ancient woman is compared to the Wandering Jew, and is so anxious to die that she enacts little funerals for herself. 'She is the prototype for a number of figures from the upper classes who have only the thin residue of the old class distinctions to give them something to cling to. Like
Miss Chauncey, met earlier in Deephaven, they might as well be dead, but they are seemingly cursed to endure meaninglessly. It seems, in fact, that Lady Ferry, who is presented throughout in archetypal terms, stands
for the aristocracy itself. She has outlived her usefulness. She "had been everywhere"; she had "lived a thousand years." Now she is pictured as she "paced to and fro" in an old garden; "and some bats flew that way
like ragged bits of darkness, holding somehow a spark of life." The 139 narrator says of Lady Ferry's existence, in words which might apply to the aristocracy as a whole, that such prolongation "far beyond the average limit" is "sorrowful; it is pitiful; it has no attractions."
Jewett demonstrates the unattractiveness of the aristocracy with supreme skill in her "Dulham Ladies," from A White Heron and Other Stories.
The story was a pet piece of editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who wrote that
"Hawthorne's pallid allegories will have faded away long before those two little Dulham ladies will give up their daring railway journey to the 20 neighboring town." The story is Jewett's finest piece of satire, and
Richard Cary admits that in this story a "shadow of doubt tinctures her nostalgia.
Depicted in "The Dulham Ladies" are two remnants of an aristo cratic family who are unconsciously out of harmony with the world around them. The Dobin sisters, because of their upbringing, have entered adulthood poorly equipped for a lifetime of continued growth. Both of their parents, like the father of Evelina Adams, have been titular pillars of the community, and have invested little warmth in the raising of the girls. Their mother had been virtual dictator of social propriety for the town of Dulham. She was, "in her prime, a walking example of refinement and courtesies. If she erred in any way, it was by keeping too strict watch and rule over her small kingdom." Their father had been another of Jewett's insipid ministers, whose social station, more than any intrinsic qualities, had attracted a wife. Madame Dobin "was no
20. Cited in Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 97.
21. Cary, Jewett, p. 42. 140 longer young when she married, and though she had gone through the wood and picked up a crooked stick at last, it made a great difference that her stick contained an ecclesiastical bark." The Reverend Mr. Dobin had been an inadequate clergyman, and as a consequence, his death filled
Dulham not only with astonishment, but "relief." At the same time, Dobin and his wife had been impelling enough to incapacitate their daughters, repressing them into a mold of puerile superficialities. "Sometimes," observed Jewett, "there is a household such as this . . ., where the parents linger until their children are far past middle age, and always keep them in a too childish and unworthy state of subjection. The Misses
Dobins' characters were much influenced by such an unnatural prolongation of the filial relationship, and they were amazingly slow to suspect they were not so young as they used to be."
Their dependency has so weakened the Dobin sisters that with the deaths of their parents the daughters flounder. They fail in their attempts to mask their unprotected middle age with the unspontaneous approach to life they have been used to. In part they seek to preserve a concept of social stratification which will make them acceptable to
Dulham strictly in terms of ancestry. They find, however, a world of change is increasingly unwilling to listen to the old stories of family triumphs which have little bearing upon the moment. As a result, they try retreating to the security of youth. They even buy hair-pieces to mask their steadily heightening foreheads. From the crumbling artifi cialities of the class system which has helped to create in them "an unusual and most painful sense of failure," they move on to other artifi cialities. They try hiding behind fashion to regain their "lost 141 ascendancy," and are unwilling to admit the ridicule evoked by the clash between their brown hair-pieces and greying eyebrows.
Two Jewett characters from the upper classes are more aware than the Dobin sisters that the attempt to maintain a class image can be stifling. Dick Dale, from A Marsh Island, even objects to the upper- class routines and rituals which seem to get in the way of simple com forts. On his way to a formal dinner he feels it "a pity that their allegiance to society did not permit any comfort or rest at that moment.
A great fire was leaping and crackling in the wide hall fireplace, and 22 the chairs nearby looked most inviting." More importantly, Dale realizes that his wealthy station has exacted patterns from him which keep him from knowing himself. After spending time with a farm family, he exclaims, to the bewilderment of his aunt, "I wish sometimes that I hadn't two cents in the world. I never was so happy in my life as I have been there; nobody every asked whether I was rich or poor. You have to be put into an honest place like that to know anything of yourself. You can't think how tired and sick I am of the kind of life I have somehow drifted into" (p. 230). As a result of his discoveries, Dale begins a search for a more fulfilling existence.
Equally perceptive, but unable to see how to act out her percep tions, is Harriet Pyne in "Martha's Lady" (The Queen's Twin). The last of a well-to-do family, she fails to break free of her routines even though she realizes her society "held the necessity of much dignity and
22. Sarah Orne Jewett, A Marsh Island (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1885), p. 218. All page references, included in the text of the dissertation, are from this edition. 142
discretion of behaviour," and of over-much "priggishness" and formalism.
While she objects to such attitudes, she has herself been so inhibited by
the formalities of her upbringing that she refuses to try to rid herself 23 of them and devotes her life primarily to reveries about the past.
In her examination of class artificialities, then, Jewett's
primary concern was to show members of the social elite as they had been
weakened by their elitism. As she did in all areas of her survey of
orthodoxy, she showed how a system can become more important than the
individuals who are a part of it. That she should make the aristocracy
based on lineage and "position" one of those systems is not surprising in
view of her aristocratic backgrounds. Nor is it surprising that Mary
Wilkins Freeman saw the upper classes primarily in the role of economic
oppressors, in view of her own experiences with poverty. Freeman does
present one of Jewett's shallow aristocrats in Alexander Bemis of
"Morning-Glory" (Understudies). Bemis starts out in life like the title-
flower. His upper-class background gives him the appearance of being
full of promise. However, Bemis1 shallowness and that of his family is
detected by Amanda Doane, his non-aristocratic fiancee. Amanda's final
rejection of Bemis is described as "the revolt of a daughter of the
people — of the modern conditions of things against all inactive
superiority."
The tone Freeman takes to describe Amanda's revolt is indicative
of the author's polemical concern with the economic aspects of the
23. See "Miss Tempy's Watchers" (The King of Folly Island), which presents an alternative to class-barriers. Two women of differing social stations are brought together by a final request by a dead friend, and realize how artificial their class distinctions are. 143
class-system. Both Jewett and Freeman gave numerous examples of those
reduced to poverty. But it was Freeman's domain, rather than Jewett's,
to launch direct attacks upon the economic system which produced that
poverty. As early as the New England Nun sketch "Sister Liddy," Freeman
exhibited tones of derision as she wrote of a village's pride in its 24 almshouse: "No town far or near had such a house for the poor." The
poorhouse recurs a number of times throughout Freeman to exemplify how
human responsibility can be transferred to an institution.
Not until the novel Jerome, however, does Freeman attack the
system directly. As we have seen in Chapter Three, Jerome Edwards,
laboring under a mortgage left the family by the desertion of his father,
is too proud to accept the love of Lucina Merritt. As we have also seen, his choice is not completely his own. In part he is motivated by his heritage. He perpetuates the Puritan belief that poverty is punishment, and should be expiated only with the severest toil.
24. Jewett also objects to the treatment of the indigent in "The Town Poor" (Strangers and Wayfarers), a story praised by C. R. Flory in his Economic Criticism in American Fiction, 1792-1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), p. 122. Nor should the impres sion be left that Jewett totally avoided other economic concerns. "The Luck of the Bogans," also from Strangers and Wayfarers, pictures indus trial America as a fallen paradise for a family of Irish immigrants. "A Neighbor's Landmark" (The Life of Nancy) ties economic criticism to ecological concern as Jewett condemns the financial callousness which leads to the strip-lumbering of an area. "The Grey Mills of Farley" — Cosmopolitan, 25 (June, 1898), 183-96, and in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 265-80 — anticipates Freeman's Portion of Labor somewhat in detailing the havoc endured by a town whose factory has closed down. See also Jewett's portrayal of the get-rich-quick mania and its de-humanizing consequences in "The Growtown 'Bugle,'" Harper's Weekly, 32 (1888), 610-11, and in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 124-131. 144
Jerome's plan of life is set against a background of villagers
who have less apparent choice about their poverty. Most do not have the
opportunity to refuse the love of someone from one of the town's richest
families. Most vocal of those without choice is Jerome's uncle, Ozias
Lamb, who struggles to live on what little he can make putting shoes
together for a large manufacturer. A former shoemaker, now undercut by
the large corporations, Lamb's frustrations have brought him to the point
where he speaks his mind "with the pitilessness of any dissenting spirit
of reform, who will pour out truths, whether good or evil, to the benefit
or injury of mankind, who will force strong meats as well as milk on
babies, and sucklings" (p. 189). Lamb is one of those "intense, self-
centered, smouldering volcanoes of human activity" Jewett speaks about in
The Country Doctor. Like other Freeman characters, he kicks against that
which is repressing him. Ozias launches into long diatribes while Jerome
helps him to put shoes together. He exclaims, for example, "What right
has one man with the whole purse, while another has not a penny in his
pocket? What right has one with the whole loaf, while another has a
crumb? What right has one man with half the land in the village, while
another can hardly make shift to earn his grave?" Lamb is particularly
resentful of property rights which in no way reflect a man's true worth.
Speaking of the landed, he says, "Bom with property, are they —
inherited property? One man comes into the world with the gold all
earned, or stolen -- don't matter which — waiting for him. Shoes all
made for him, no peggin' for other folks; carpet to walk on, sofas to lay
on, china dishes to eat off of. Everything is all complete; don't make no odds if he's a fool, don't make no odds if he 'ain't no more sense of 145 duty to his fellow-beings than a pig, it's all just as it should be"
(p. 193).
"Ozias Lamb would deliver himself of riotous sentiments"; but, notes Freeman, "on that bench he would sit and peg shoes till his dying day. He would have pegged there through a revolution." Lamb, in spite of his words and perceptions, is basically trapped. In part he is trapped by his own emotions, which have no real direction. In part his entrapment comes from the need to earn a living, even if it is from the system he deplores. And, too, Lamb is trapped by his fellow villagers. While his words are potent when he speaks his mind before the villagers, he finds their sense of failure, and their bondage to prevailing systems, too difficult to penetrate:
The village people were not slow to recognize a certain natural eloquence in Ozias Lamb's remarks; oftentimes they appealed to their own secret convictions; yet they always trembled when he arose and looked about with that strange smile of his. Ozias said once they were half scared on account of the Lord, and half on account of Doctor Prescott. Ozias was often clearly unorthodox in his premises — no one could conscientiously demur when Doctor Prescott, a church meeting having been called, presented for approval, the minister being acquiescent, a reso lution that Brother Lamb be requested to remain quiet in the sanctuary, and not lift up his voice unto the Lord in public unless he could do so in accordance with the tenets of the faith, and to the spiritual edification of his fellow-Christians. The resolution was passed, and Ozias Lamb never entered the door of the meeting-house again, though his name was not withdrawn from the church books (pp. 196-97).
As a result, Lamb returns to the private oratories of his work-bench, defeated by the collective defeats of the village.
Lamb's theories do ultimately find an outlet in an incredible piece of authorial plot-manipulation. Jerome, abetted by a mixture of chance and conviction, distributes among the townspeople a $25,000 146 inheritance he has just received. The act forces Dr. Prescott and the miserly Simon Basset to act upon a vow made years earlier that they would give away one-fourth of their wealth if Jerome should, by some impossible circumstance, receive and give away $25,000. Jerome's action is catalytic in bringing about a more equal distribution of wealth in the town. More over, Jerome proposes that the villagers use their new funds to set up their own factory, to be their own proprietors. The plan is underway as the novel closes, but Freeman refuses to speculate upon the possible success of the idea, her strongest single economic proposal.
The Portion of Labor (1901) deals with confrontation between capital and labor on a larger scale. Freeman highlights the confrontation thorugh the love between Robert Lloyd, the heir-apparent to a shoe- manufacturer, and Ellen Brewster, a factory worker. Ellen embodies the revolutionary element of the novel. She acts in terms of theories like those of Ozias Lamb. Ellen has been raised in a factory city with an awareness of the problems of labor. As a girl she had heard the workmen talking with her father about the sweat-shop conditions. She had heard men: like Nahum Beals curse management and speak of how "There's knives to sharpen today," as he calls for a workers' revolt. At an early age, there is over Ellen's "childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and 25 poverty of the world." Her first overt response to the economic system comes in the valedictory address she gives at her graduation. In it she becomes a full-fledged polemecist. "She had hesitated at nothing, she
25. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Portion of Labor (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901), p. 106. All page references, included in the text of the dissertation, are from this edition. 147 flung all castes into a common heap of equality with her strong young
arms, and she met them all on one level of the synagogue. She forced the employed and his employer to one bench of service in the grand system of things, she gave the laborer, and the laborer only, the reward of labor"
(p. 192). She has in essence proposed a Jerome Edwards system of manufacture.
When Ellen finally goes to work in the factory she begins to more actively challenge the Lloyd approach to production -- an approach ruled by the inalterable profit-motive. As one who derives a "sense of comradeship" in moving with "the army of labor," Ellen eventually becomes instrumental in organizing the workers and leading a strike. As a result, she initiates her own personal conflict with Robert Lloyd. She tells a fellow worker after wages are cut, "It is the great capitalists who have made [times] hard by shifting the wealth too much to one side.
They are the ones who should suffer, not you. What have you done, except come here morning after morning in cold or heat, rain or shine, and work will all your strength? They who have precipitated hard time are the ones who should bear the brunt of them" (p. 477). Lloyd cannot understand
Ellen's reasoning. He cannot accept the idea of management absorbing losses as well as labor: "A man cannot conduct a business on such principles," he says. The division around principles keeps Robert and
Ellen apart through most of the action; but the division also leads to murder, attempted murder, and intense privation as the wage-cut and ensuring strike generate bitter feelings. Ellen eventually comes to question man's holding to principles. After a bitter winter for the towns, she tells her fellow workers, "I did not count the cost. All I 148 thought of was the principle, and it has to be counted in with it. I see now, I don't think the strike ought ever to have been." Lloyd himself, once the workers have relented and he feels his own principles untarnished, rescinds the pay cut.
The novel becomes indecisive at the end. Freeman's tone, like
Ellen's, softens. The fervor of Jerome and the earlier sections of The
Portion of Labor are tempered by what seems to be strong doubts about whether labor struggles are effective at all when seen in totality.
Freeman refuses to sustain her earlier pronouncements about labor-control of industry. Instead, she appears satisfied that the status-quo for the workers is re-established, and that Robert and Ellen can be married. She ends the novel on a note which violates the rest of the book. She essentially justifies drudgery in a move which Walter Fuller Taylor calls
"A unique solution to the ethics of industrialism, not paralleled, 26 seemingly, in any other work" of American fiction. In the concluding paragraphs, Andrew Brewster, Ellen's father, finds that "labor is not alone for itself, not for its equivalent in silver and gold, not even for the end of human happiness and love, but for the growth in character of the laborer. 'That is the portion of labor,' he said."
The ending of The Portion of Labor is made to seem even more unconvincing by succeeding works in which Freeman challenges the work- ethic. Some doubts were raised initially, in fact, through her portraits of Deborah Thayer and Jerome Edwards, both driven to obsessiveness by the old ethic. Two years after The Portion of Labor she included a piece
26. Walter Fuller Taylor, The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), pp. 103-104n. 149 called "The Apple Tree" in her volume Six Trees. Depicted in the sketch is the Maddox family which, in the midst of industrious and unhappy neighbors, seems to thrive on idleness and an appreciation of nature.
Ellen Brewster was described as a girl who could have great pleasure and beauty in nature "had she come to earth without her background of orthodox traditions" (p. 447). The Maddoxes are free of that orthodoxy, partic ularly the feeling that industry is of greater worth than happiness. The apple tree in their yard serves as a symbol of their discovery of inner truths in the midst of apparent squalor. With the smell of apple- blossoms in the yard, "the air was honey-sweet; for there was no crying evil of uncleanliness about the place, and in the midst of the yard was a whole bouquet of spring. That was the one redemption of it all. Often one, after looking away, unless he was carping to stiff-neckedness, would glance backward, and the sight of the apple-tree would serve as a solace to his very soul, and beauty and the hope of the resurrection would vanquish squalor and the despair of humanity." The beauty of the tree touches the Maddox family itself: the fruit tree "bloomed and sweetened, and the man and woman, in a certain sense, tasted and drank it until it became a part of themselves, and there was in the midst of the poverty and shiftlessness of the Maddox yard a great inflorescence of beauty for its redemption." The sketch poses an alternative to the toils of the New
Englanders, whose industry, while sanctioned by their heritage, often manifested itself as pettiness and seemed to be doing little to counteract failure. On the other hand, the Maddoxes, sitting idly on their front porch to the disgust of their neighbors, are, through their relationship with nature, in touch with regenerational powers. 150
In The Shoulders of Atlas, Freeman presents a figure in whom the
old ethic of work is essentially a harmful narcotic. Henry Whitman, who
has been turned out of the shoe-shop because of old age, receives an
inheritance which ends the necessity of his ever working again. However,
Whitman grows uncomfortable with comfort: "After kicking against the
pricks for so long, he had come to feel a certain self-righteous pleasure
in it which he was now forced to forego" (p. 30). He is like a man
cursed. As he tells his wife, "To tell the truth of it, Sylvia, I've had
my nose held to the grindstone so long I don't know as it's in me to
keep away from it and live, now."
Henry eventually sneaks back to work, without telling his wife.
But while the times have grown more prosperous, the younger workers
question the presence of the wealthy Whitman, who might be taking a job
away from someone else. They cannot understand his reason for coming
back: "Toil had not yet gotten the better of their freedom of spirit
. . . . Henry had become its slave ... He had become, in fact, as a
machine which rusts and is good for nothing if left long inactive"
(p. 221). As Henry explains to another worker, "You can't shake off a
burden that's grown to you." Henry is one of the characters suggested by
the title of the novel. Whitman is too bent over by the ways of the
world to accept the possiblity of inner happiness. Freeman points out
that toil "was the only happiness which he had not become too callous to
feel."
One other major area of concern stands out in the challenge to
orthodoxy by Jewett and Freeman: sexual roles, and particularly the role
of women. There are other areas as well. Jewett questions war and 151 27 patriotism. Both writers question the educational system. But such concerns are minor in comparison to the areas already discussed, and to their attack on sexual attitudes. In 1912, Elias Lieberman wrote, "For some peculiar psychologic reason the field of New England portraiture has been monopolized by three women. They are Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah
Orne Jewett and Alice Brown. Perhaps it is because the life of New
England with its barrenness of esthetic inspiration has been especially irksome to the more volatile sex. Having made upon them a deeper spiritual impression it may have found a more ready and more skillful 28 literary expression." It is reasonable to assume that writers who were distinctly aware of how social attitudes can cause individual doubts should concern themselves with those attitudes which most directly affected them. The role-entrapment they felt as women may easily have been a goad
27. See, for example, the comments by Temperance Kipp in the Jewett novel A Marsh Island, p. 263. She calls giving up one's life for a country "a darned shame, and I always shall." See also Jewett's touching account of "Peach-Tree Joe," about a boy who is killed just as he realizes he has no business being in a war: originally published in Califomian Illustrated Magazine, 4 (July, 1893), 187-191 — and in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 202-206. Also indicative of her skepticism about war is her portrait of Santin Bowden in The Country of the Pointed Firs, touched upon briefly in Chapter Two. Aunt Hannah in "An Every-Day Girl," criticizes the quality of teaching: "I'm sick of everybody trying to keep school; 'tis one o' the scarcest gifts there is, but to get the chance seems to make a high candlestick for the worst of tallow-dips." In A Portion of Labor, Freeman castigates education which has little relevancy to the student. Risley calls modern education "both senseless and futile .... look at the trash taught them in their text-books -- trash from its utter dissociation with their lives. You might as well teach a Zulu lace-work" (p. 165).
28. Elias Lieberman, The American Short Story (Ridgewood, N. J.: The Editor, 1912), p. 36. 152 to their seeking literary outlets in the first place, and the national awakenings of feminism made the time right for them to express their concerns. With Alice Brown, one finds occasional moments when she seems to be advocating free love; and her portraits of Dilly Joyce in both
Meadow-Grass and Tiverton Tales, or Barbara Benedict- in Paradise, show women dedicated to keeping themselves free of socially-dictated roles.
For Jewett, the feminist concern is a constant theme. Freeman's concern is less immediately apparent.
Freeman's feminism is probably overlooked by critics because of her constant use of marriage for the resolution of stories and novels.
An 1897 review of Jerome suggested that Freeman grows in her works "so to sympathize with her lovers as to be morally incapable of killing or 29 parting them in deference to the rules of art." More recently, Larzar
Ziff has suggested with some derision that Freeman "presents the single state as a frustrated existence, since in it a woman is deprived of what 30 Mrs. Freeman considers to be her birthright — a man." Ziff concludes that the suitor in a Freeman stoiy is, no matter how uncharming he might seem, "preferable to no man at all."
A theme in Freeman's later works would appear to lend credence to appraisals such as that of Ziff. Following her unfortunate marriage to
Charles Freeman, the writer began to portray woman as having an inherent need to be controlled by a man. Such depiction of woman may reflect a kind of rationalization on her part: her attempt to understand how she
29. "Jerome," The Bookman, 6 (1897-98), 143.
30. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890's (New York: Irving Press, 1966), p. 293. 153
tolerated his mistreatment of her for eighteen years until he was
committed to the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane. In "Corona
tion," from The Copy-Cat, Jim Bennet exclaims, "They can talk about
women's rights -- I feel as if they ought to have them fast enough, if
they want them, poor things; a woman has a hard row to hoe, and will
have, if she gets all the rights in creation. But I guess the rights
they'd find hardest to give up would be the rights to have men look after
them just a little more than they look after other men, just because they
are women." Nothing in the story indicates Freeman's disagreement with
this statement by the rather saintly Bennet. Freeman, in fact,
demonstrates the theme again in "The Umbrella Man," from the same volume.
Judging from the wider spectrum of Freeman's writings, however, one must conclude that Ziff has overstated his case by leaving out a
crucial element in her literary relationships between the sexes.
Freeman generally shows female subservience to be culturally induced, rather than innate. The Portion of Labor, for example, contrasts the aggressive Ellen Brewster with the pathetic portrait of Mrs. Norman
Lloyd, who has been trained to feel her relative unimportance before men.
Freeman calls Mrs. Lloyd an "eminent survival of the purest and oldest- fashioned feminity, a very woman of St. Paul." The wife of the factory- owner, she stands in awe of her husband, certain that he was "much wiser than them and that the world couldn't be regulated by women's hearts, pleasant as it would be for the world and the women, since the final outcome would doubtless be destruction" (p. 121). So obsequious is
Mrs. Lloyd that she hides a terminal disease from her husband; "She felt a desperate shame because of her illness; she felt it to be a direct 154 personal injury to this masculine power which had been set over her gentle feminity. It was not so much because she was afraid of losing his affection that she concealed her affliction from him, as because she felt that the affliction itself was somehow an act of disloyalty" (p. 399).
In the same novel, Freeman demonstrates how a sense of inevitability created by long-established attitudes has produced persons like Mrs. Norman Lloyd. The clear-sighted lawyer Risley ridicules the suggestion of higher education for the gifted Ellen Brewster. "What is the use?" he asks. "There she is in her sphere of life, the daughter of a factory operative, in all probability in after-years to be the wife of one and the mother of others. Nothing but a rich marriage can save her, and that she is not likely to make" (p. 165). Risley reflects the social view that a woman's only plausible chance for fulfillment was through marriage. And so it turns out to be for Ellen Brewster. Freeman's characters rarely see an alternative to marriage. But such an apparent fatedness is another of those perceptual tragedies in Freeman -- where long habit makes something seem predestined.
Freeman carries her discussion of such inevitabilities into even more volatile territory when she ties the plight of woman to a subject only hinted at by Jewett: the repression of the sex drive by moral orthodoxy. We have already seen the repressive failures of a number of
Freeman's lilac-spinsters such as Caroline Munson and Louisa Ellis.
Edward Stone sees Freeman's spinsters, and Jewett's Horatia Dane in "A
Lost Lover," as being at the center of a tradition of sexual fear which includes Hawthorne's Hepzibah Pyncheon and Faulkner's Emily Grierson. 155 31 Their obsessive orderliness, Stone suggests, "has its roots in sex."
Such an interpretation could easily be carried too far; yet Freeman's brief but startling portrayal of nymphomania in The Shoulders of Atlas instructs a reader that what seem like veiled discussions of sex in her earlier writings may indeed have been intended as such by her.
Perry Westbrook has compared elements of The Shoulders of Atlas to Giles Corey, Yeoman. "In East Westland, the village in which The
Shoulders of Atlas is set, neurosis of sexual origin is endemic.
Hysteria is as rife as in seventeenth-century Salem, where sexual jealousies and frustrations — at least according to Mrs. Freeman's Giles
Corey — vied with religious fear and bigotry in producing abnormal 32 behavior." Ann Hutchins has Become Lucy Ayres in Shoulders. Jealously in love with Horace Allen, she even attempts to poison Rose Fletcher, met previously in Chapter Three. Lucy's mother recognizes the power of the sex-drive in her daughter, and, after Lucy has virtually thrown herself upon Horace, explains to him, "Sometimes, quite often, it may happen that too heavy a burden, a burden which has been gathering weight since the first of creation, is heaped upon too slender shoulders. This burden may bend innocence into guilt and modesty into shamelessness, but there is no more reason for condemnation than in a case of typhoid fever" (p. 178).
Lucy, as with Henry Whitman and the compulsive work-ethic, is crushed under social burdens. All that is spontaneous in her is repressed, and
31. Edward Stone, A Certain Morbidness (Caibondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 10.
32. Westbrook, Freeman, p. 157. 156 like Madelon Hautville, the resulting defiance of that repression seeks an outward destructiveness.
Sometime later, Horace Allen, who is a high-school principal, looks with sadness upon the girls of the school: "He realized the helplessness of the young things before forces of nature of which they were brought up in so much ignorance, and his soul rebelled. He thought to himself that they should be armed from the beginning with wisdom"
(p. 179). Horace's observation is as close as Freeman comes to offering a solution for sexual pressures which come into conflict with moral institutions. She does not, in The Shoulders of Atlas, openly advocate sexual abandon, although she wrestles with the dilemma caused by spon taneous sex impulses being able to find expression only through something as permanent as marriage. In an unpublished manuscript which Foster places somewhere in the nineties, during one of her dark periods, Freeman did in fact toy with open violation of moral precepts. The interior monologue of a spinster named Jane Lennox shows a seething resentment against the codes which surround her.
I sometimes wonder what would have been the state of the world, had it not been for the Tables of Stone. Once made they would not be broken. They were broken. They are broken now. Could the Devil have existed, even in the imagination of men, had it not been for those terrible and sacred Tables of the Law? Did he exist in the fullest sense before?
It is a pity that those tables could have been broken, that the will and strength of mortal man should have been sufficient to break them.
Here am I, a woman, rather delicately built, of rather deli cate tastes, perfectly able to break those commandments, to 157
convert into dust every one of those Divine Laws. I shudder before my own power, yet I glory because of it.33
She, like characters throughout the writings of Freeman, senses a potency
she is not fully able to define, although she recognizes such potency is
made to seem that much greater because of its connection to external
precepts. One again thinks of Louisa Ellis' dog — made to seem more
ferocious because of his tethering.
Jame Lennox seems imbalanced because of her discovery, just as so
many Freeman characters are knocked out of balance by their sexuality.
Those in whom the outer pressures are greater than the inner — like
Louisa Ellis, Caroline Munson, and Camilla Merritt -- implode. Those in
whom inner pressures prevail — like Madelon Hautville, Rebecca Thayer,
and Lucy Ayres — explode. The most felicitous in Freeman are those who
achieve some sort of balance between inner drives and external demands,
like Rose Fletcher and Rose Berry. Thus Freeman's call, in The Shoulders
of Atlas, for a greater understanding of sex. Drives, she realizes,
cannot be catechized away, and, more importantly, they cannot be ignored.
As Lot Gordon, the sacrificial figure in Madelon who most fully in
Freeman understands the delicate balance between internal and external, says, "Nature's nature and the best of us come under it." The under
standing of impulse would seem, in Freeman, to be a partial solution for
the frustrations of East Westland — a village whose very name suggests a stasis caused by the pull of opposing forces.
33. Foster, pp. 142-43. It should also be noted that during the same year as she was writing The Portion of Labor, Freeman composed The Heart's Highway. The novel is set in the old South and seems to relish its portraiture of love relatively unimpeded by social and moral concerns. 158
Jewett's feminism avoids biological concerns, and devotes itself
instead to a questioning of marriage and career opportunities for women.
One may be tempted to suggest that Jewett's attacks are part of an attempt
to justify her having never married. However, she seems to have had no
personal uneasiness on that score. An exchange with John Greenleaf
Whittier, cited by Matthiessen, illustrates her contentment with single
life: "One day Mr. Whittier asked her: 'Sarah, was thee ever in love?
She answered, with a rush of color, 'No! What ever made you think that?'
and Mr. Whittier said, 'No, I thought not'; and again she laughingly 34 explained that she had more need of a wife than a husband." Jewett's
examination of marriage seems more obviously to be an extension of her
general concern with social doctrines than a personal justification.
"Tom's Husband" (The Mate of the Daylight and Friends Ashore)
describes a marriage in which the husband feels more comfortable doing wifely chores like housework, while the wife, Mary, has a stronger desire than Tom to run a business. After the first bloom of marriage is over, the couple discovers that marriage, with its precriptive assignments for
all husbands and wives, can be a prison:
They understood suddenly that instead of dwelling in heaven they were still upon earth, and had made themselves slaves to new laws and limitations. Instead of being freer and happier than ever before, they had assumed new responsibilities; they had estab lished a new household, and must fulfill in some way or other the obligations to it. They looked back with affection to their engagement; they had been longing to have each other to them selves, apart from the world, but it seemed that they never felt so keenly that they were still units in modern society .... Somehow, there was a feeling of disappointment, and they would have died sooner than confess it — whether they were quite so happy as they had expected.
34. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 72. 159
Marriage has made them acutely conscious of the roles society expects them to play, and Tom suffers from the feeling that "I'm the first man, apparently, who has wished he were a woman." At the same time he is quietly aware that Mary, with her desire to go into business, would be thought strange: "It seems to me that it is something like women's smoking: it isn't wicked, but it isn't the custom of the country."
The two finally defy customs, accept the initial scorn of society, and flourish for a time under the transfer of roles. Public pressures finally makes them uneasy in their exchange; but before they resume their old roles, Tom realizes that man has too long been calling roles "natural" which are merely customary. He undergoes a vivid re-enactment of what he considers to be the surrender of self of most women:
He seemed to himself to have merged his life in his wife's; he lost his interest in things outside the house and grounds, he felt himself fast growing rusty and behind the times, and to have somehow missed a good deal in life; he had a suspicion that he was a failure. One day the thought rushed over him that his had been almost exactly the experience of most women, and he wondered if it really was any more disappointing and ignominious to him than it was to women themselves. 'Some of them may be contented with it,' he said to himself, soberly. 'People think women are designed for such careers by nature, but I don't know why I ever made such a fool of myself (p. 232).
Tom understands, for the moment at least, how a role can subsume the individual.
"Tom's Husband" fails artistically short of many of Jewett's sketches; it becomes bound in its own diatribe. Yet critics have failed to note its thematic importance. For example, Richard Cary writes that the "surprisingly anti-feminist denouement leaves no doubt about Miss
Jewett's conservatism. With only slight obeisance to the repressive effects of convention upon enterprising females, she declares it fitting 160 35 that away from the soil — a man be a man, a woman a woman." However, the reversion by the couple to traditional roles is not a lauding of convention but a reaffirmation of the terrible hold convention has upon persons. Ironically, Tom recoils from his recognitions about role- slavery by retreating into the traditional sexual role. He is unable to act upon his instincts and asserts his failure by turning for stability 36 to that which has initially violated those instincts.
In A Country Doctor, one of her two attempts at a novel, Jewett becomes somewhat autobiographical in her attack on customs pertaining to sexual roles. While it would be oversimplifying to say that Nan Prince is Sarah Orne Jewett, the relationship of Nan to Dr. Leslie, her 37 guardian, is reminiscent of Jewett's relationship to her own father.
Nan is trained much as young Sarah was, to investigate and analyze the world around her. Moreover, Nan's belief that liberty is the soul's 38 natural state is the controlling principle of Jewett's life. Nan
Prince's decision to devote her life to medicine instead of marriage might as well be equated to Jewett's decision to devote herself to writing.
35. Cary, Jewett, p. 126.
36. For an earlier version (from an unidentified Canadian news paper thought by Cary to be around 1880) see the growing awareness in John Webber of the way he has taken his wife, and women, for granted, in "Stolen Pleasures" — from Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 37-44. For a more fanciful depiction of role-awareness see "Hallowell's Pretty Sister," Good Company (1880), 263-269 -- and in Uncollected Short Stories, pp. 45-52.
37. See the article Jewett wrote for Youth's Companion, 65 January 7, 1892), pp. 5-6. In it she compares the doctor with her father.
38. Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin § Co., 1884), p. 158. All page references included in the body of the dissertation are from this edition. 161
The author's severest attacks on custom occur when Nan goes to stay with Miss Anna Prince, an elderly aunt in a declining but formerly well-to-do branch of the family. Anna is a rather stereotypical New
England spinster, who has lost her one love years before over a "petty misunderstanding," and has been unable to give her heart to anyone else.
She now lives out her years as part of the fading aristocracy of a coastal town aptly named "Dunport." Shallow and inflexible like most of
Jewett's other aristocrats, Aunt Anna tries to shape Nan to the old ways.
She woos the girl with old customs until Nan feels, as they walk into church, that "it might seem proper that she and her aunt should walk down the church aisle together as if they were married."
At her aunt's and with the threat of being tied to her heritage,
Nan instinctively begins to rebel against anything which would violate her sense of freedom. She attacks superficial religion: "I think one should care more about being a good woman than a good Episcopalian"
(p. 232). She criticizes a world which relegates primary honors to men and scorns self-fulfilling women: "But everything helps a young man to follow his bent; he has an honored place in society .... I don't see why it would be a shame and dishonor to a girl who is trying to do the same thing and to be of equal use in the world" (p. 282). And Nan denounces marriages which are little more than a surrender to convention:
"It certainly cannot be the proper vocation of all women to bring up children, so many of them are dead failures at it; and I don't see why all girls should be thought failures who do not marry. I don't believe that half those people who do marry have any real right to it, at least until people use common sense as much in that most important decision as 162 in lesser ones" (p. 283). Old Captain Walter of Dunport amplifies on the problems of marriage when he says to Nan,
Fouled, we say aboard ship, when two vessels lay near enough so that they drift alongside. You can see that havick 't would make, for ten to one they don't part again till they have tore each other all to shoestrings; the yeards will get locked together, and the same wind that starts one craft starts both, and first one and then t' other lifts with a wave, don't ye see, and the rigging's spoilt in a little time. I've sometimes called it to mind when I've know o' married coupled that wasn't getting on. 'T is easy to drift alongside, but no matter if they was bound to the same port, they'd 'a' done best alone (p. 254).
The captain reinforces Nan's feeling that she would make her own way in the world.
Jewett ultimately puts Nan through a trite love affair with
George Geriy, another representative of the aristocracy who courts under the tutelage of Aunt Anna. Nan is torn for a time between her love of 39 George and her wish to serve humanity through medicine. She as last turns from George when she perceives that "all the world's sympathy and all tradition fight on his side." She is satisfied that she can "look forward and see something a thousand times better than being his wife, and living here in Dunport keeping his house, and trying to forget all that nature fitted me to do" (p. 321). Nan frees herself enough so that she can say at the conclusion of the novel, "0 God, I thank thee for my future."
39. Jewett, in a number of later stories, expresses the belief that friendship and loyalty should precede, and in many ways are more important than, love. See, for example, "The Life of Nancy," and "A War Debt," from The Life of Nancy; and "The Queen's Twin," "Bold Words at the Bridge," and "The Coon Dog," from The Queen's Twin. 163
Nan Prince's thankfulness for the future is made possible in part by discoveries about how conventions can undermine the present, making it unthinking, unresponsive. She learns, as she says, that being a "dead failure" can be closely tied to those conventions. As a result of her perception she is freed to follow her instincts. Nan's discovery was the discovery of her author, and of Maiy Wilkins Freeman. The writings of both Jewett and Freeman reflected their desire to share such a discovery with those of their region. One of Jewett's favorite dicta, taken from
Plato, was that "the best thing one can do for the people of a State is 40 to make them acquainted with each other." Like Plato, though, they tried to go beyond this dictum. They tried to make each individual acquainted with himself.
The task of Jewett and Freeman was a paradoxical one: on the one hand they had only to teach the simple lessons of nature and renewal, which, as Richard Cary has written recently, "Only the naive 41 will regard ... as naivete." And yet their region was, in many ways, naive. Those lessons had been lost for too long. Jewett and Freeman were, as a consequence, trying to teach their region about those things which kept it from learning; they tried to cause a region to respond to things which had made it unresponsive. As we saw in Giles Corey and "In
Dary New England Days," each writer pointed out the possibility of regeneration, but left as uncertain whether people would break deeply ingrained attitudes.
40. Sarah Orae Jewett Letters, ed. Cary, pp. 84 and 164.
41. Richard Cary, "Introduction" to The Uncollected Short Stories, xviii. 164
The frustrations arising from such a paradox may have affected both Freeman and Jewett at last. After little more than fifteen years as
an author, the quality of Freeman's writing declined sharply. Part of her personal decline is undoubtedly explainable in terms of her marriage
and her move to Metuchen, New Jersey, but these events may have been escapes in their right. She clearly did not marry for love. Jay Martin has suggested that Freeman's literay deterioration came when she at last grew "frustrated by the environment that necessarily limited and degraded 42 the characters in her early stories." Except for a few instances noted during this study, Freeman's writings after 1900 show an unwillingness or inability to confront the New England decline as directly as she had.
Her realism pales, and she moves instead into melodrama, stories of the supernatural, romances, and regional pieces which are more souvenirs than realism.
Freeman's disenchantment is best captured by an article she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in 1917. In it she lashes out at those who apparently would try to remember her as a writer of stories about quaint types. She seems to reflect the bitterness of a writer who has tried to rock the establishment, but has incredibly been remembered as one who made the establishment easier to live with through charming stories.
Speaking of her "The Revolt of 'Mother'" (A New England Nun), one of her most frequently cited stories, she wrote: "In the first place, all fiction ought to be true, and the Revolt of Mother is not in the least true. When I wrote that little tale I threw my New England traditions to
42. Martin, p. 152. 165 the wind and trampled on my New England conscience. I have had and still have retribution. There never was in New England a woman like Mother.
If there had been she most certainly would not have moved into the palatial barn .... She simply would have lacked the nerve. She would 43 also have lacKed the imagination." Freeman is being harsh with New
England women, with the attitude of one who has failed to wake them up in the past. She has also admitted her need, even early in her career, to stray from the truth at times --to escape the harsh realities of much of her fiction. She needed her diversions. And when, a decade later, she became largely escapist, she may simply have done so as a New Englander who had failed in her confrontation with New England's failure.
IVhether Sarah Orne Jewett would have followed the same route is conjectural. A carriage accident in 1902 ended her writing career. She had, through her career, found an outlet through the production of occasional pieces in which she did not have to confront her culture, but could instead rely upon a stylized, unstrained sentimentality. Still, the year before her accident she had produced her longest escapist work.
The Tory Lover, a colonial romance, may have been an indication that she too was moving more decisively away from her severe examination of New 44 England.
43. Cited in Williams, p. 170.
44. The third prominent New England regionalist of this period, Alice Brown, also went through a similar change after 1900. Like Freeman, she was apparently unable to sustain her intense, confrontational realism and turned to stories with cosmopolitan and European settings, and to a greater production or romances. It should also be pointed out that was not exclusively a New England phenomenon. Other regionalists like Carland and Howe also moved away from their taut realism as the new century began. 166
As the twentieth century began, the decline continued. New 45 Englanders continued to submit to it, and would continue to submit-
Nationally and regionally, mammonism and big business maintained their ascendancy. Observers like Paul Elmer More questioned whether social, economic and religious forces of long duration were to continue to over power the possibilities of regeneration. In an essay published in 1904,
More spoke of the evolution of the New England personality, as delineated in the writings of Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, and Freeman. "We have seen," he wrote, "a morbid spirituality, spurning the common nourishment of man kind, slowly starve itself into impotence. Now, as the hunger of humanity begins to assert itself unhampered by an vision beyond its own importunate needs, are we to behold a new ideal create in turn another half-civilization, blindly materialistic as its predecessor was harshly spiritual? That question may not be lightly answered. Only it is clear that, for the present, the way of growth for the literature of New
England lies through the opening of this door of strictly human sympathies."^
While, by the time of More's essay, Jewett and Freeman had per haps surrendered to the inevitability of his "half-civilization," they had anticipated his concern for a quarter century. They had grown up watching New England lose its place of leadership among the nation's regions. More importantly, they had seen New England's decline in its
45. The continuation of the decline and the old attitudes can certainly be found, for example, in Ethan Frome, in Frost's "Home Burial," in Robinson's "New England," and O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra.
46. More, p. 187. 167 most impelling form, as it reached and debilitated individuals.
Basically, Jewett and Freeman were not theorists. Each tended to personalize things too much to deal effectively in the over-general.
What touched them finally was the particularization of the decline, as it affected those around them and, to an extent, as it touched the writers themselves. Each saw tendencies in herself -- tendencies toward escape, toward regression, toward giving up -- spread throughout the villages and countryside. Each saw pettiness and pendantry and inflexibility cutting persons off from one another, and from the love and understanding which could help them through difficult times. Each saw individuals compensate for failures through intensification of results rather than alleviation of causes. And all this in a region where nature could still be observed in abundance, where the patterns of regeneration were on constant display.
Jewett and Freeman had each observed and understood the messages of nature. Each had turned to the natural world as a personal refuge, much as fellow New Englanders had sought refuge in other externals — personal routines and habits, or the authority of the past -- which might seem unchanging in the changing world. But while many New Englanders turned to authorities which reinforced a sense of personal inadequacy,
Jewett and Freeman found in nature a sense of man's being more than they had been taught. They perceived that man was connected to all of life, and that the great patterns of the universe were intended to be his patterns as well.
As Jewett and Freeman had become aware of the history of their region, they began to understand how the present attitudes had come into being. As More would do, they saw antecedents of the decline in the 168 colonizing processes of the seventeenth century. The disciplines, the repressions, the reliance upon rigid authority which had served as the basis of a cohesive new society had passed on to later generations. And this in spite of the fact that the Puritans had left a clear lesson to posterity about how counter-productive in the long-run such an inflexible approach to life, and a minimization of self-trust, could be, Puritan rigidity had left both the society and the individual susceptible to failure. Puritanism had undermined the idea of second chances; and two centuries later persons like Joanna Todd would simply give up after the loss of a first love. Meanwhile the Puritan had been taught to cling, in the face of failure, ever more fiercely to what was well-established -- even if what was well-established had given impetus to failure.
Thus, as we have seen, if Jewett and Freeman were to resensitize the New Englander to the idea of second chances, they, as writers, had to confront the founding fathers, and all that had emanated from the fathers. The well-rooted contrivances of man could no longer be taken for granted, if the initiatives of present-day man were to mean anything.
There would be much of the New England heritage that each writer would admire: primarily character traits like honesty, forthrightness, sincerity. But as each writer realized, even these qualities, when separated from self-confidence, could actually divide individuals and harden them. Such qualities could become the rituals, the routines, seen throughout this study, which are sincerely, scrupulously, yet misguidedly undertaken.
The solution, as Jewett and Freeman evidenced it, the way to restore self-trust, took two directions: reacquainting man with the 169
ongoing processes of nature, and challenging that reliance on man-made
institutions which helped to maintain man's rearward orientation. The
two writers approached the task somewhat differently. Freeman was more
often the crusader, Jewett more the reflective observer. Yet each
attempted to challenge the very core of their culture with a severity and
intensity which few who have examined their writings have been willing to
admit. Jewett may indeed have written too gracefully to be regarded as a
serious reformer. Freeman's happy endings may have achieved similar
results among critics. Yet one suspects that the widespread underesti
mation by critics of the challenge to orthodoxy in Jewett and Freeman may
be attributable to the writers' sex and their inclusion in the local-
color school as much as to anything else.
This present study of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman has attempted to keep the authors from the fate of so many of
their characters: consigned to a close-ended realm of pre-conception and
absolutism. Anthologies continue to present Jewett as a graceful recorder of an age which was sadly passing, and Freeman as a master of painful,
precise character vignettes. Breadth without much depth is attributed to
Jewett, moments of depth without much breadth to Freeman. And yet, as their writings demonstrate, each ranged across the history of their
region's culture, to achieve broad perspectives. In turn, such perspec tives provided the context for intensive examinations of the way in which
man turns his little failings into greater failures. It is only fitting that the achievements of Jewett and Freeman be afforded the revitalization which new perspectives about them can bring. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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