A Companion to the American Short Story
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on the role of landscape, a lens that could be distinguished from the more detached
observations of Thoreau and other male nature - writers of the period, a precisely crafted
woman ’ s lens.
In his essay, “ Walking, ” Thoreau recommended that in order to commune with
nature, one must take at least “ four hours a day … sauntering through the woods
and over the hills and fi elds, absolutely free of all worldly engagement ” (333 – 4). As
he sauntered past the homes where women were preparing dinner or tending to
children, he wondered “ how womenkind, confi ned to the house still more than men,
stand it ” (334). Three New England regionalist writers, Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne
Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, exemplify how women writers managed to
“ saunter, ” despite the confi nement Thoreau described, by redefi ning the concept of
“
home
”
in the context of their landscapes. This redefi nition became a means for
women writers to reconstruct feminine identity in terms that defi ed conventional
gender boundaries. They developed in their stories a freedom of voice and a sense
of power through the language they used when they spoke of, and seemingly for,
the natural world. Willa Cather described Jewett ’ s stories as “ living things caught
in the open, with light and freedom and air - spaces about them. They melt into the
land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself ” (Cather
x). Thaxter, Jewett, and Freeman often chose for their narratives female characters
who could dwell in such “ air - spaces ” of their own with a sense of hard - won freedom;
their fi ction, with its focus on women ’ s relationships to their natural environments,
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became a form of resistance to traditional nineteenth - century expectations for women
within the “ woman ’ s sphere. ”
Marcia Littenberg explains that women regionalists were both attracted to tran-
scendentalism and simultaneously compelled to extend and revise its perspective to
take into account women
’
s experiences (Littenberg 140).
2
Thaxter, Jewett and
Freeman “ fi nd a world in a pond, an emblem of society in a teacup, the power of
nature in a wildfl ower ” (139). In her letters, Celia Thaxter in fact referred to Thore-
au ’ s careful and deliberate studies of nature and what differed in her own approach. 3
Thaxter and her women contemporaries created their own form of transcendentalism
through highly personal responses to nature that suggested both sympathy and
identifi cation.
Thaxter, Jewett, and Freeman focused on the regions they knew best in New
Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts. These writers have become the
center of a considerable body of feminist criticism on regionalism by scholars such as
Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Ammons, Sandra Zaggarell, and Amy
Kaplan, among others. They have been celebrated in the manner of early feminist
criticism, and more recently analyzed in an historical context in which the limitations
and racial exclusivity of their worlds becomes apparent. What interests me is the
way their depiction of landscapes, havens in nature, whether in the form of fi ctional
autobiography or autobiographical fi ction, suggests an imagined ideal of female
autonomy.
Regionalism, according to Fetterley and Pryse, provided a space for nineteenth -
century women writers to critique the construction of “ separate spheres ” (Fetterley
and Pryse 13). Region, then, “ marks precisely that point where women ’ s culture
becomes conscious of itself as critique ” (14). Setting their characters fi rmly within the
regions they knew and bringing them outside the home through their relationship to
the natural world, regionalist women writers of this period challenged the usual
boundaries established by their male literary peers. Celia Tichi ’ s defi nition of women
regionalists best captures the meaning of regionalist writing for these writers: “ Under
cover of regionalism … these women writers explored the territory of women ’ s lives.
Their essential agenda in the era of the new woman was to map the geography of
their gender. The geography of America formed an important part of their work, but
essentially they charted the regions of women ’ s lives, regions both without and within
the self ” (Tichi 598). As Fetterley and Pryse argue in Writing Out of Place , American
women regionalists “ were not interested in depictions of nature for its own sake;
rather, they focused on the relationship between that world and human conscious-
ness ” (4).
Celia Thaxter, the nineteenth - century writer who described her landscape on the
Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire in the 1870s, serves as a striking
example of a woman who turned to landscape to voice those inner passions that
remained otherwise unexpressed. Thaxter ’ s life and work capture the complexities of
the nineteenth - century tug between domestic constraints and the impulse to write.
Her focus on the Isles of Shoals allowed her to nurture her passions, despite the
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393
demands of her role as mother, daughter, and wife, through the discovery of a language
that defi ned who she was in the context of this place and what it meant. She was one
of the earliest environmentalists, a regionalist whose life and language was shaped by
her responses to the island. A study of her letters, poetry, autobiographical prose,
drawings, and children ’ s stories reveals Thaxter ’ s quest to shape a unique identity
through her portrayal of her relationship to the plants, birds, fl owers, animals, and
sea life that surrounded her; this new identity was set apart, though not completely
disconnected, from her domestic life. In this setting, and through such writing, she
found an arena for self - expression that was unavailable to her within the confi nement
of her home.
As Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse argue, Thaxter captures perhaps more
powerfully than any other regionalist of her time, the particularity of place not as the
thing to be looked at but as the thing to be listened to, felt through the writer ’ s expe-
rience, understood from the inside (Fetterley “ Theorizing ” ). 4 “ Ears made delicate by
listening, ” Thaxter says in Among the Isles of Shoals , can “ hear ” the sounds particular
to Shoals, can see through the “ ill - defi ned and cloudy shapes ” that are visible as a
viewer fi rst approaches the islands, and can know this region (19, 9). The ear is her
primary tool for knowing her island. Thaxter captures the sound of high tide, and
“ the music of the waves, and their life, light, color, and sparkle ” ( AIS 19). She con-
tinually focuses on these sounds, and her own sensitivity to the “ particularity ” of every
wave and rock as they “ speak ” to her:
Who shall describe that wonderful noise of the sea among the rocks, to my ear the most
suggestive of all sounds in nature? Each island, every isolated rock, has its own peculiar
rote, and ears made delicate by listening, in great and
frequent peril, can distinguish
the bearings of each in a dense fog. The threatening speech of Duck Island ’ s ledges, the
swing of the wave over halfway Rock, the touch of the ripples on the beach at Londoner ’ s,
the long and lazy breaker that is forever rolling below the lighthouse at White Island,
– all are familiar and distinct, and indicate to the islander his whereabouts almost as
clearly as if the sun shone brightly and no shrouding mist were striving to mock and
to mislead him. (19 – 20)
Childe Hassam ’ s painting of Thaxter presents a tall, stately woman dressed in white,
an angel in her ethereal garden, passively observing a fl ower. It is as though she too
is one of the fl owers to be observed. 5 But when we turn to Thaxter ’ s self - representation
in her autobiographical work, we hear a voice that actively beckons us to listen
rather than look. She aimed to get beneath the “ shrouding mist ” that “ mocks and
misleads. ”
“ Ever I longed to speak these things, ” Thaxter says in Among the Isles of Shoals , “ to
speak the wind, the cloud, the bird ’ s fl ight, the sea ’ s murmur … Nature held me and
swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be silent any longer ” ( AIS 141 – 2).
As she shifted her attention from the domestic realm to the open landscape in her
prose, Thaxter developed a capacity to convey the essence of who she was beneath all
the “ cloudy ” layers of who she was expected to be. But as Thaxter ’ s own language
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implies, hearing this voice requires good listening. Without careful listening, it is
easy to set Thaxter aside as a tour guide to a remote place, as a sentimental poet, or
as a good - natured horticulturalist who shared her tricks for fi ghting off slugs.
A glance at Thaxter ’ s life will contextualize her approach to her focus on landscape
in her short stories. Born in 1835 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Thaxter noted
that her earliest memories were not of the mainland but of the remote and rocky
White Island where her father became lighthouse keeper when she was four. Hers was
an isolated childhood with no companions beyond her parents and two brothers, and
she recalls the “ wilderness of desolation. ” 6 Yet, as Karen Kilcup suggests, such isola-
tion also opened her to become an “ acute observer and lover of nature ” (280). In the
absence of human company, she sought companionship in the natural world, hence
her many descriptions of her organic connection to fl owers, plants, rocks; indeed, as
she describes them, they are part of her “ community. ” Early on, however, the solitary
quality of Thaxter ’ s life shifted. When she was 12 years old, her father, Thomas
Laighton, went into business with Levi Thaxter to build the Appledore Hotel on
nearby Appledore Island, and Levi became her tutor. In 1851, at the age of 16, she
married Levi, who was then 27. With three sons, housekeeping responsibilities, and
a demanding husband, married life quickly took on all of the burdens of domestic
entrapment. Her brain - damaged son Karl required her constant care and attention;
she wrote of Karl that “ always he makes an undercurrent of misery and anxiety deep
down among the very sources of my being. ” 7 Nevertheless, Thaxter resisted institu-
tionalizing Karl as had been suggested by others, and devoted much of her adult life
to protecting him from what she saw as a hostile world.
Levi quickly grew to dislike the islands, and pulled his wife inland to a home in
Newtonville, Massachusetts, away from what she called the “ lulling murmur of the
encircling sea ” ( AIS 121). Perhaps even more painful than the domestic realities was
the sense of being, as the title of her poem suggests, “ landlocked ” : “ To feel the wind,
sea - scented, on my cheek ” but only to hear “ afar off ” voices “ calling low; – my name
they speak! ” ( “ Land - Locked ” l. 20). This line, with its suggestion of the power of
identifi cation as the voice of the island calls her name from a distance, can be compared
to the sense of namelessness and loss of identity that she felt inland in Newtonville.
Interestingly “ Land - Locked ” was her fi rst published poem, her fi rst step as well toward
recognizing the intensity of her connection to Shoals as a source for her creative iden-
tity. Thaxter ’ s original handwritten copy of the poem is bordered with her watercolor
sketches of the island, and draped with her rendering of the bright leaves and fl owers
of Shoals. She refers to her thoughts of Shoals as an almost physically painful “ craving ”
for the “ murmur of the wave / That breaks in tender music on the shore ” ( “ Land -
Locked ” l. 24).
Thaxter ’ s individuality as an artist was deeply connected to the region of Shoals,
and this became increasingly clear to her when her husband asked her to part with
it. While Levi went off to hunt and stuff birds, Celia joined the Audubon society. 8
As the marriage declined, she increasingly assisted in running the hotel on Appledore
and her stays on the island became lengthier. Despite the obstacles she faced, she did
Landscape as Haven
395
manage to write and publish her work, including her collections of poems and stories
(1872 – 96), Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) , and An Island Garden (1894) . She wrote
of her effort to return to the island as a kind of compulsion, a heroic gesture to honor
that voice that kept calling her back. One September, for example, she wrote: “ I came
over on Friday in half a gale with the sea beating over us from stem to stern, but I
was so anxious to get here that I didn ’ t care anything. ” 9 Increasingly, she expressed
the depth of her need for this place. To her friend, John Greenleaf Whittier, she wrote:
“ Sometimes I wonder if it is wise or well to love any one spot on this old earth as
intensely as I do this! I am wrapped up in measureless content as I sit on the steps
in the sun in my little garden, where the freshly turned earth is odorous of the
spring. ” 10
Perhaps because it was the realm she associated with her childhood, Thaxter found
on this island the means to go back to a time before the compromises that nineteenth -
century womanhood had required. When she was back on the island, separated from
Levi ’ s demands, she could return to that time. Her descriptions suggest that this was
the one place where childhood could resonate into adulthood. On the island, she was
able to write, and her writing assisted her in reconstructing a life seemingly “ exempt
from the interruptions ” of the civilized world ( AIS 99). She saw herself as the sole
interpreter of her landscape and this granted her the power of a language that had
been muted in her life with Levi.
Reimagining the island through a child ’ s lens enabled Thaxter to recreate her island
most poignantly. The short story that captures this process most profoundly is her
seemingly simple, but haunting, fairy tale, “ The Spray Sprite. ” This is also a text that
best captures how Thaxter ’ s concept of the female child ’ s relationship to nature stood
in opposition to the pull of the domestic realm. Here a “ little maid, ” a spray sprite,
fi nds
pleasure only when she can “ feel the salt wind lift her thick brown hair and kiss
her cheek ” or “ wade bare - footed into the singing sparkling brine ” ( “ Spray Sprite ” 3).
The sprite communicates with nature in its own language, listening to the north wind
as it “ fi ghts me, ” or the west wind as it “ plays with me ” (SS 4). Only the sprite seems
to hear and understand the “ talking ” on this island; it is the talk that Thaxter knew
and interpreted as a child, and the talk that she gives her readers in this story: “ The
waves made a continual talking among themselves, and sweet and disconsolate came
the cry of the sandpipers along the shore ” (SS 7). Setting up a sharp dichotomy
between this pleasure in nature and the expectations of girlhood, Thaxter incorporates
in her story a reminder of the world the sprite initially rejects:
She hated to sew patchwork. Oh, but she was a naughty child, – not at all like the good,
decorous little girls who will perhaps read this story. She didn ’ t like to sweep and dust,
and keep all things bright and tidy. She wished to splash in the water the whole day
long, and dance, and sing, and string shells, and be idle like the lovely white kittiwakes
that fl ew to and fro above her and came at the beckoning of her hand. She looked with
scorn on dolls and all their appointments and never wished to play with them, – it was
almost as bad as patchwork! But she loved the sky, and all the clouds and stars, the sun
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Leah B. Glasser
that made a glory in the east and west at morning and evening, the changing moon,
the streaming Northern Lights. (SS 3 – 4)
The sprite looks “ with scorn on dolls, ” but responds with wild abandon to the sight
and sound of the sea. It is this capacity for wildness that she must relinquish when
she is later whisked away, in a fairy fl eet of purple mussel shells, to the civilized world
where she will eventually conform to the “ tame life ” of sewing patchwork and doing
good deeds.
The more startling Thaxter ’ s nature images are, the more dramatic the sacrifi ce
required on the other side of the horizon. The sprite runs along beside the sandpipers,
the very birds with which Thaxter most identifi ed, at the edge of the shallow waves,