A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 23
about ’ em; ’ t was suffi cient and so ordered ” (59). As in Pointed Firs , Mrs. Goodsoe ’ s
position is mediated through a more modern narrator who challenges and occasionally
demurs from her views. But, as in Pointed Firs , the narrative frame by no means
dominates the rural perspective. Indeed, one senses, as in Pointed Firs , a kind of self -
irony occurring: the limitations of the narrator ’ s “ modern ” view is also being ironized
as circumscribed and limited; she concludes by lamenting the modern “ world [which
is] foolish enough to sometimes undervalue medicinal herbs ” (68).
Many Jewett stories may thus be read as affi rming an alternative to the colonizing
disciplinary grids of modern industrial culture, conceived dialectically as a negative
criticism of the homogenizing, federalizing tendencies of the modern world. Local -
color literature in general may thus be seen as a “ minor literature ” – as defi ned by
French critics Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (in Kafka: Pour une litt é rature mineure
[1975] ) and applied to Jewett by Louis Renza in “ A White Heron ” and the Question of
Minor Literature (1984) According to Deleuze and Guattari, a hallmark of minor lit-
erature is that it is written in a “ deterritorialized language. ” To write from such a
position means “ to fi nd one ’ s own point of underdevelopment, one ’ s own patois, one ’ s
own third world. ” ( Kafka 33; author ’ s own translation). Renza claims Jewett ’ s works
can be seen as representing “ ‘ points of nonculture and underdevelopment, the zones
of a linguistic third world ’ intent on sabotaging the major language of American
patriarchal culture ” (Renza 35).
Jewett ’ s and the other local colorists ’ use of “ patois ” or dialect throughout their
work defi antly affi rms the solidity and reality of this colonized linguistic realm –
notwithstanding the fact that Jewett ’ s frame narratives are in standard English (while
she herself probably spoke in a Maine dialect). One might argue that such a use of a
“ normalizing ” frame might serve to set off the dialect as deviant, if not inferior, but
the frames in Jewett ’ s work do not dominate or erase the embedded dialects; they
rather serve to accentuate them, even to elevate them much as a picture frame high-
lights the picture it encases or a setting enhances a gem. Such a frame says: “ different
but valuable. ” It affi rms – indeed, emphasizes – the ontological presence of the items
New England Local-Color Literature
99
scored. The embedded dialect also often serves to ironize the frame language, render-
ing it less authoritative, less “ normal, ” much as the narrator ’ s “ modern ” viewpoint in
Pointed Firs and other works is undercut as authoritatively dominant by indigenous
premodern views.
Other practices, customs, and characters of premodern rural culture are similarly
rendered ontologically present in Jewett ’ s treatment. A work like Pointed Firs is a
veritable catalogue, for example, of use - value production practices from Mrs. Todd ’ s
herbal preparations to the fi sherman Elijah Tilley ’ s knitting. Dunnet Landing is not
a world of capitalist entrepreneurs engaged in economic imperialism. Mrs. Todd does
charge for her herbs and presumably also charges rent of her tenant, but the relation-
ship between the two quickly eclipses economic roles, operating fi nally in terms of
kinship relation. Dunnet Landing is in fact largely a subsistence economy, close to
being an exemplar of the premodern gift economy, governed as it is by kinship ties
and codes of hospitality. Most of the economic exchange in the work is through gifts,
and most of the products exchanged are handcrafted. The increasing dominance of
factory - made goods is lamented by another Jewett character, a tailoress, the title
character in “ Miss Debby ’ s Neighbors ” (1883), who complains of how people are now
buying “ cheap, ready - made clothes, ” which has the effect of making everyone look
alike. “ She always insisted … that the railroads were making everybody look and act
of a piece, and that young folks were more alike than people of her own day ” ( “ Miss
Debby ” 191).
In the same story the urban narrator, expressing the viewpoint of modernity with
its emphasis on unifying hypotaxis, offers a complaint that the indigenous speaker ’ s
method “ of going around Robin Hood ’ s barn between the beginning of her story and
its end can hardly be followed at all ” (191). The indigenous narrator is uneducated
and her narrative style refl ects the oral mentality that A. R. Luria famously identifi ed
in illiterate peasants, who resisted organizing material into deductive or hypotactic
patterns. In his study of oral culture, Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter J. Ong lays
out several features that characterize oral thought and expression, among them that
it is “ additive rather than subordinative, ” “ aggregative rather than analytic, ” “ redun-
dant or ‘ copious, ’ ” “ empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced, ”
and
“
situational rather than abstract
”
(Ong 36
–
49). All of these features readily
describe the narrative technique not just of Miss Debby but of the numerous indig-
enous Jewett characters who narrate tales within her stories. In this way aspects of
oral culture are embedded or transcribed in print in Jewett ’ s and other local colorists ’
work – another instance of the author serving as mediator between two cultures – oral
and print, premodern and modern.
Many, if not all, of Jewett ’ s and other local colorists ’ embedded narrators similarly
speak in the fashion Ong describes, using primarily parataxis, and at the extreme (as
in “ Miss Debby ’ s Neighbors ” ) losing the unifying hypotactic thread of the narration.
Signifi cantly, in this story it is the modern author – urban, literate, and educated –
who criticizes this round - about narrative tendency, looking vainly for some sort of
deductive climax.
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Josephine Donovan
Many of Jewett ’ s stories, for example, are constructed in layers of narration where
an outsider narrator from the metropole comes to a rural region, and encounters an
insider who tells her tale paratactically in vernacular idiom. This technique is used
most famously perhaps in Pointed Firs but may also be seen in such masterful stories
as “ The Courting of Sister Wisby ” (1887) and “ An Autumn Holiday ” (1881).
In “ Sister Wisby, ” for example, an urban I - narrator, wandering in the country (the
fi rst few pages read indeed like a nature essay), encounters the herbalist Mrs. Goodsoe,
who is in the process of gathering “ mulleins, ” an herb. The two engage in a meander-
ing, gossipy conversation in which the herbalist reveals herself to harbor the typically
antimodern attitudes noted above. Her grasp of local knowledge or m ē tis is immedi-
ately apparent: when the urban narrator (who speaks in standard English, as opposed
to Mrs. Goodsoe ’ s dialect) asks whether the herbalist plans to gather the herb pen-
nyroyal, she i
s immediately put down:
“
‘
Pennyr
’
yal!
’
repeated the dear little old
woman, with an air of compassion for inferior knowledge; ‘ ‘ tain ’ t the right time,
darlin ’ . Pennyr ’ yal ’ s too rank now. But for mulleins this day is prime ’ ” ( “ Sister Wisby ”
57). When the narrator offers to help her cut the mullein, Mrs. Goodsoe tells her
how: “ ‘ Now be keerful, dear heart … choose ’ em well. There ’ s odds in mulleins same ’ s
ther is in angels ’ ” (57). The narrator “ listened respectfully ” (57), while Mrs. Goodsoe
rambles on anecdotally, fi nally (two - thirds of the way through the story) reaching the
main story about “ Sister Wisby, ” which is sparked by a discussion of another herb,
“ Goldthread. ”
“ An Autumn Holiday ” similarly starts out as a nature essay, an I - narrator wander-
ing the countryside with her dog. Eventually (four pages into the story) she comes
upon a house where she fi nds two women spinning wool. They stop and chat with
the visitor and after several shorter anecdotes the main tale emerges (more than half -
way through the story), which concerns the transvestite “ Miss Daniel Gunn. ”
Mrs. Goodsoe ’ s insistence that the herbs be locally grown points to a central tenet
of the community ethos celebrated in Pointed Firs and other local - color works. In this
preindustrial, predisciplinary environment, time is not measured by the clock, goods
are not appreciated for their abstract exchange value, and people are not uprooted and
homogenized through mass media stereotypes. Rather, they remain rooted in their
own eccentric (de)territory; their produce comes from their own familiar environment
– Mrs. Todd grows her own herbs and/or gathers them from well - known local habi-
tats. She ministers to people as individuals with histories and not in accordance with
abstract symptoms and diagnoses.
In her work Mary E. Wilkins Freeman focuses less on the alternative community
seen in Jewett ’ s work and more on the resisting practices of women whose life - worlds
are being threatened by the intrusion and imposition of alien disciplinary forces.
Several concern critiques of asylums. “ Sister Liddy ” (1891) is set in an “ almshouse ”
where the poor – young and old – and the insane are kept. One of the inmates,
Polly Moss, a sadly deformed woman, tells stories about her fi ctitious well - to - do
sister. Her fantasies constitute a kind of “ anticipatory illumination, ” an imagined
alternative to her own benighted, confi ned existence. “ A Mistaken Charity ” (1891)
New England Local-Color Literature
101
concerns the escape of two sisters, one deaf and the other blind, from an asylum,
back to their own home, the details of which are lovingly beheld. In the asylum
they had been forced to wear uniforms, which include caps that the sisters despise.
“
[N]othing could transform these two unpolished old women into two nice old
ladies. They did not take kindly to white lace caps and delicate neckerchiefs
”
(Wilkins [Freeman], Humble Romance 244). When they leave, they place the caps
defi antly on bedposts, thus repudiating the imposition of sameness. Two other
Freeman stories – “ Bouncing Bet ” (1900) and “ The Elm Tree ” (1903) – concern
rejections of asylum life.
In several Freeman stories the lives of women who are living peacefully with
their animals or children are violated by the intrusion of an alien authority who
destroys their world. Often the authority fi gure resembles the modern social worker –
bureaucrat who has the power to intervene in people ’ s private life - worlds. In “ Brakes
and White Vi ’ lets ” (1887) a girl ’ s father claims custody from her grandmother, using
a medical theory that the grandmother ’ s home is too damp and will bring about
consumption. He thus removes the child; the grandmother has the choice of moving
to an alien environment with the girl or remaining in her beloved home. She fi nally
decides to move, requesting wistfully that “ a root of white vi ’ lets an ’ some brakes ”
be dug up, “ so I kin take ’ em with me ” ( Humble Romance 117) – a pathetic attempt
to keep one ’ s local roots with one even while conceding their destruction.
“ A Gatherer of Simples ” (1884) similarly concerns a rural “ yarb woman, ” an herbal-
ist, who informally adopts a child only to have her urban grandmother claim custody
of her so she can be raised properly. The child runs back to her adoptive mother,
however, and the grandmother dies, so the story ends happily. “ Old Woman Magoun ”
(1905) is a tragic version of a similar plot. Here again it is a grandmother who is
raising a granddaughter; in this case, it is the father who claims custody when the
child is entering puberty. He thinks the grandmother is raising her too narrowly; she
thinks he intends to sell the child into prostitution. To save her, the grandmother
allows her to eat the poisonous berries of the deadly nightshade, which kill her. Thus,
the old woman is willing to use her local knowledge of herbs perversely, to save the
child from being inscribed in the circulatory system of patriarchal power/knowledge,
which entails the exchange of women.
In “ A Poetess ” (1891), another poignant Freeman story, the alien discipline that
destroys the title character
’
s life
-
world is that of aesthetic criteria. Betsey Dole,
another impoverished spinster, lives happily in her green - world bower, which is “ all
a gay spangle with sweet - peas and red - fl owering beans, and fl anked with feathery
asparagus ” (Wilkins [Freeman], New England Nun 140). Betsey ’ s calling is writing
poetry, particularly verse for local consumption, occasional mourning poetry, which
she writes to console neighbors who are grieving. Her reward comes not from having
her work praised by distinguished critics or published in famous journals – and thus
being stamped in the currency of academic literary discourse – but rather in the
emotional comfort it brings her friends. Unfortunately, however, she learns that a
local clerical authority, a minister, has branded her work as sentimentalist trash.
102
Josephine Donovan
Accepting his verdict, she burns all her work and soon dies. The silence and erasure
imposed upon this woman by a translocal discipline could not be more graphic. A
fi nal aspect of the local colorists ’ resistance to the colonizations of modernity may
be found in their ecologically sensitive treatment of nature and animals. (For a fuller
discussion of this issue see Mayer, Naturethik und Neuengland - Regionalliteratur: Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman [2004] .)
Jewett ’ s resistance to capitalist and industrial development of the natural world is
clearly stated in a number of letters. Perhaps her most poignant and moving state-
ment of this position comes in an 1892 letter: “ The other day quite out of the clear
sky a man came to Mary with a plan for a syndicate to cut up and sell the river
bank all in lots … . Sometimes I get such a hunted feeling like the last wild thing
that is left in the fi elds ” (Fields 90). In a much earlier letter (1877) Jewett similarly
remarks, “ Berwick … is growing and fl ourishing in a way that breaks my heart ”
(Cary 36).
In several stories Jewett expressed intense empathy with the natural world, even
to the point of explicitly endorsing an animistic theory of nature; see especially “ An
October Ride, ” “ A Winter Drive, ” and “ River Driftwood, ” which were collected in
Country By - Ways (1881). But Jewett ’ s most powerful story of “ cultural resistance ” to
colonization is her justly famous “ A White Heron. ”
The story concerns a confrontation between the rural premodern world of Sylvia,
a young girl who lives with her grandmother in an isolated woodland, and the world
of modernity represented by an urban scientist, an ornithologist, who invades her
peaceful green sanctuary looking for a rare white heron he hopes to kill and stuff for
his collection. That the ornithologist has a scientifi c, classifi catory, “ entomologizing ”
purpose (to reprise Foucault ’ s term) highlights his status within the text as an avatar
of modernity. His perspective is that of the quantifying, objectifying gaze of modern
science. He sees the bird as an object to be scrutinized and colonized within the
scientifi c paradigm of species and subspecies of Avis .
The girl, on the other hand, is preliterate and uneducated in the perspectives of
modernity; she has an animist view of nature. Its creatures are alive to her as pres-
ences, as “ persons. ” “ There ain ’ t a foot o ’ ground she don ’ t know her way over, ” her
grandmother explains, “ and the wild creatur ’ s counts her one o ’ themselves. … Last
winter she got the jay - birds to bangeing here ” (Jewett, Pointed Firs 165). That Jewett
grants equal ontological status to the creatures of the natural world may be seen in
several other works in which she evinces a desire to give voice, to articulate the
“ language ” of the non - human. In “ River Driftwood, ” for example, the narrator
meditates:
Who is going to be the linguist who learns the fi rst word of an old crow ’ s warning to
his mate … ? [H]ow long we shall have to go to school when people are expected to