A Companion to the American Short Story

by Alfred Bendixen

  and stands on the rocks “ when the billows came tumbling in sending the spray fl ying

  high in the air and throwing handfuls of crimson dulse at her, or long brown tresses

  of seaweed, which she caught and fl ung back again, while she was drenched with the

  shower, and the wind blew her about in rough play ” (SS 4). No such play is available

  to the sprite when she is taken “ beyond the faint blue cloud of distant coast ” and into

  the “ great world. ” One is reminded of Jewett ’ s Sylvia in “ A White Heron, ” but here

  the child leaves her paradise behind. As she stands at the seashore looking toward the

  horizon just before she will leave her island, the sprite does not notice what Thaxter

  is sure to tell her readers – that “ the sea was full of cool fi re, – ‘ sparks that snap and

  burst and fl ee, ’ every wave left its outline in vanishing gold on the wet weeds and

  sand; her feet were covered; it was as if she had on golden - spangled slippers ” (SS 8).

  The heat and light of such imagery beckons the reader back to the island even as the

  sprite parts with it. She leaves behind her “ pet pillow, ” a gray rock that had become

  as “ smooth as satin, ” and sets off with the fairy fl eet to see what lies beyond the horizon

  (SS 8).

  As if to convey her own uncertainty about the legitimacy of her choice to continue

  her reveries on the Isles of Shoals, Thaxter incorporates another voice in this story,

  one that reminds her girl readers of what they must give up to pass into adulthood.

  She asserts a moral, “ a secret worth all the beauty she had lost … that to be useful

  and helpful, even in the smallest ways, brings a better bliss than all the delightful

  things you can think of, put together ” (SS 13). And so the exquisite sprite transforms,

  or conforms, and does sewing and good deeds “ to the end of her days. ” This shift in

  the story ’ s emphasis seems to express the view of her nineteenth - century audience that

  such play, such pleasure in the language of nature, cannot be taken seriously. Thaxter

  has her sprite leave it behind. But the story does not leave readers with a sense that

  this was wise at all, much as the narrator insists upon the truism that turning from

  play to service and “ useful work ” is “ the best blessing God gave the world ” (SS 13).

  Instead, Thaxter ends the story with the lingering sound of her island and its magic,

  the sound of the sea echoing in a child ’ s ear: “ You would never know now that she

  had been a spray sprite and danced among the breakers, and talked and laughed with

  the loons, for she is like everybody else, except that, sleeping or waking, year after

  year, she keeps in her ears the sad, mysterious murmur of the sea – just like a hollow

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  shell ” (SS 13). Her conclusion is a subtle critique of the nineteenth - century ideology

  of the woman ’ s sphere.

  From the perspective of her nineteenth - century audience, the natural play of the

  girl - child must be suppressed in womanhood in favor of being useful and serving

  others. It is in fact what Celia Thaxter did when she married Levi and moved inland.

  Contrary to her sprite, however, Thaxter found a way to sustain the childhood pleasure

  of her island setting into adulthood through her writing and through her return to

  the Isles.

  Sarah Orne Jewett captures this playful dimension of Thaxter well in her preface

  to Thaxter ’ s poems. Here Jewett describes watching Thaxter as she walked across

  White Island shortly before her death: “ walking lightly over the rough rocks with

  wonted feet ” and showing Jewett “ many a trace of her childhood ” (Jewett, “ Preface ”

  to Poems vii). Jewett recalls as well their day together and how Thaxter explored with

  her on Appledore “ all the childish playgrounds dearest to her and to her brothers; the

  cupboard in a crevice of rock, the old wells and cellars, the tiny stonewalled enclosures,

  the worn doorsteps of unremembered houses ” (vii). As they sat in midsummer in the

  bayberry bushes, Thaxter listened to the sounds of her island with the same sensitive

  ear she had as a child and invited Jewett to watch and listen with her. Thaxter paused

  with the same childlike wonder at the sight of a new wildfl ower, and told Jewett that

  she had never seen such a fl ower on the island before. As Jewett followed Thaxter

  across her island, she noted that “ under the very rocks and gray ledges, to the far nests

  of the wild sea birds, her love and knowledge seemed to go ” (viii). Jewett ’ s reference

  here reminds us of her character, Sylvia, in her short story, “ A White Heron. ” It is as

  though she is describing Sylvia grown - up and at peace with her choice.

  On the Isles of Shoals, Thaxter retained the “ sure footing ” of her childhood by

  honoring her capacity to “ listen ” to the sounds of her island. Furthermore, she found

  that she too had listeners. She too could be heard. As her work began to receive rec-

  ognition, she drew to her island artists, musicians, and writers (including Childe

  Hassam, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie and James Fields, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain,

  and one of her most treasured poet - friends, John Greenleaf Whittier), and they lis-

  tened to her read her poetry aloud. She could, as she said she longed to do, literally

  speak out loud with the sound of “ the wind, the cloud, the bird ’ s fl ight, the sea ’ s

  murmur ” to those who would hear the strength of her language and recognize its link

  to nature ( AIS 141).

  It is interesting to consider the way in which the more frequently anthologized

  Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in response to what she saw in the life and work of the less

  well - known Celia Thaxter. Jewett ’ s depiction of the natural landscape and its relation-

  ship to community, as Sandy Zagarrel explains, “ emphasizes their harmonious, organic

  identity. ” 11 Jewett was born in 1849 in South Berwick, Maine, a small coastal town

  in which she remained through her adult life. Unlike Thaxter, Jewett remained single

  throughout her lifetime, and led a much more active life, traveling frequently to

  Boston, Europe, and elsewhere. She maintained close ties to women, most notably

  Annie Fields, with whom she “ began a pattern of intimate and shared life that lasted

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  until Jewett ’ s death in 1906 ” (Fetterley, “ Reading ” 165). While Thaxter spoke in her

  letters of the struggle to write in light of an unhappy married life that involved relo-

  cation, and a strained motherhood, Jewett was more easily able to see her writing

  career as a life choice fully validated by her companion, Fields. In the course of her

  career, her primary focus was on the short story. She is most well known for Deephaven

  (1877), A Country Doctor (1884), A White Heron and Other Stories (1886) , and The

  Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) .

  As if to honor Thaxter ’ s world on the Isles of Shoals and reject Thaxter ’ s own

  moralistic conclusion to “ Spray Sprite, ” Sarah Orne Jewett created a tribute to resist-

  ing the journey into the realm of acceptability, the journey to which Thaxter has her

  sprite succumb. Jewett was drawn to the island images so prevalent in Thaxter ’ s work,

  and incorporated
similar imagery in her best - known work, Country of the Pointed Firs .

  She turned to the coast and its nearby islands to redefi ne the concept of solitude in

  feminine terms, creating for women a place that is sustained through a connection to

  the mainland, nurtured and supported by its nearness, and yet set apart and free from

  its expectation and demands.

  As Paula Blanchard suggests, “ Thaxter ’ s death was fresh in Jewett ’ s mind when

  she wrote ‘ Pointed Firs ’ ” (Blanchard 293). Jewett was probably reading the proofs of

  Thaxter ’ s Stories and Poems for Children in 1895, and she edited the poems directly

  afterwards. In her preface to Thaxter ’ s text, Jewett refers to her ability to teach “ young

  eyes to see the fl owers and birds; to know her island of Appledore and its seas and

  sky ” (Jewett, “ Preface ” to Stories iii).

  Jewett ’ s Country of the Pointed Firs builds not only on her observations of life in

  coastal Maine, but also on her profound admiration of Celia Thaxter after her visit to

  the Isles of Shoals. She depicts the islands near Dunnet Landing as anything but ideal,

  yet she also celebrates the autonomy that such isolation affords. In Joanna ’ s choice to

  be an “ uncompanioned hermit, ” Jewett depicted the choice to resist the demands of

  patriarchy as paradoxically both isolating and fulfi lling. She also reimagines a world

  in which such a choice is validated. Her narrator observes, “ I had been refl ecting upon

  a state of society which admitted such personal freedom and a voluntary hermitage ”

  ( “ White Heron ” 69). “ Poor Joanna ” is pitied by the mainland community for her

  utter isolation on Shell Heap Island, but she is also supported by them and described

  as free, and Mrs. Blackett, the idealized maternal hostess on the remote Green Island,

  is “ queen ” of her domain. These landscapes are places of refuge, havens. What they

  offer their women inhabitants is the proximity of human connection in an arena set

  apart and in a place where women are in charge of their own lives and choices.

  In one of her most frequently quoted letters to Annie Fields, Jewett ’ s close com-

  panion, Thaxter wrote: “ Oh Annie … if it were only possible to go back and pick up

  the thread of one ’ s life anew … could I be 10 years old again – I would climb to my

  lighthouse top and set at defi ance anything in the shape of man. ” 12 Many have specu-

  lated that Jewett ’ s 9 - year - old character, Sylvia, in “ A White Heron ” builds from

  Thaxter ’ s image in this letter of a child ’ s resistance to giving up her singular vision

  from the top of the lighthouse for the attention of a man. In Country of the Pointed

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  Firs , Jewett gives the gift of such defi ance to Joanna, the character who goes off to

  live on an island after a “ disappointment of the heart. ” Although Jewett has others

  claim this was Joanna ’ s penance for the sin of her “ anger, ” it becomes a place that

  grants her the freedom to say “ she didn ’ t want no company, ” because “ Joanna was

  Joanna ” (78). It was in her most frequently anthologized story, “ A White Heron, ”

  that Jewett most fully explored the resistance to conventional constructions of gender

  through communion with nature.

  In “ A White Heron, ” Jewett portrays Sylvia, whose very name associates her with

  the woodlands. Torn between the natural world in which she is as much at home as

  Thaxter ’ s “ spray sprite, ” and the fi rst intimations of the “ great power ” of love in a

  “ woman ’ s heart, ” Sylvia relinquishes the world of men when she decides to resist

  revealing the location of a beautiful heron in response to a hunter ’ s request. Although

  Sylvia “ would have liked him vastly better without his gun, ” and “ could not under-

  stand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much, ” she is drawn to this

  man and is attracted to the “ dream of love ” that he evokes in her newly discovered

  “ woman ’ s heart ” ( “ White Heron ” 201). Tempted by the man ’ s plea, she establishes

  instead a renewed relationship with the white heron and they “ watched the sea and

  the morning together ” (205). The uncanny parallels to Thaxter are everywhere in the

  story, even in the reference to the ornithologist ’ s love of stuffi ng birds, reminiscent

  of Thaxter ’ s husband ’ s sport. Yet Jewett chooses a different ending for Sylvia than

  Thaxter does for her spray sprite, an ending that counters Thaxter ’ s own experience

  at age 16 of marrying Levi Thaxter.

  Identifi cation with the heron prevents Sylvia from giving up its secret place to the

  hunter. Sylvia learns the secret of the heron “ through her willingness to enter the

  bird ’ s world, to get up before sunrise, make the ‘ dangerous pass ’ from oak tree to pine

  tree, and climb to the very top from which she can see not only sunrise and sea but

  where the white heron has its nest ” (Fetterley and Pryse, Writing 119). While the

  hunter was prepared to

  “

  alter the environment,

  ”

  Sylvia will neither alter nor be

  altered. Jewett does not minimize the cost of Sylvia ’ s silence, for the child looks long-

  ingly at the world beyond the forest, the world she imagines on the other side of the

  sea. Anticipation of the greater loss that entry into that world requires is fi nally what

  stops Sylvia, as well as a love for the freedom she feels at the sight of nature.

  While Thaxter ’ s sprite will enter the world of service to others, Sylvia, in resisting

  the hunter, will not, though Jewett concedes “ she could have served and followed

  him and loved him as a dog loves! ” (205). When she climbs to the top of the great

  pine tree, “ the last of its generation, ” to spot the heron, she spots both the bird and

  the sea itself. “ She knows his secret now, the wild, light, slender bird that fl oats

  and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world

  beneath

  ”

  (204). In her choice to protect the bird and remain alone in her rural

  world, Sylvia hears sounds just as the sprite does in Thaxter ’ s stories. But they are

  sounds that sustain her by conjuring a visual image of her relationship with the heron

  and preventing her from parting with what she loves most. “ The murmur of the

  pine ’ s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came fl ying

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  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 ”

  (204 – 5).

  Interestingly the echo of what she hears is not only the sound of this freedom and

  bliss in her communion with the bird, the freedom to remain at peace fully and

  autonomously with nature. The other sound Sylvia hears is a reminder of what she

  must resist: “ the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with

  the loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the

  piteous sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs

  hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood �
�� (205). Jewett poses the

  critical question: “ Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been,

  – who can tell. Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summertime,

  remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country

  child ” (205). Jewett ’ s call to nature is to honor the choice Sylvia has made, to grace

  her with the companionship of the natural world and the gift to hear its secrets, secrets

  Jewett voices through her prose. Jewett poetically depicts the choice to live in nature,

  free of male domination. With some acknowledgment of “ treasures lost ” in her con-

  clusion, Jewett still leaves readers with a confi rmation of the choice.

  From the very start of the story, it is clear that Jewett ’ s lens is dual: the lens of the

  child and the lens of the natural world. Even the cow ’ s perspective enters her depic-

  tion of region in her opening passage:

  The woods were already fi lled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o ’ clock,

  though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little

  girl was driving home her cow, a plodding dilatory provoking creature, in her behavior,

  but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from the western light, and

  striking deep into the dark woods, but their feet were familiar with the path, and it

  was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not. There was hardly a night the

  summer through when the old cow could be found waiting at the pasture bars; on the

  contrary, it was herself away among the high huckleberry bushes, and though she wore

  a loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring.

  (197).

  Jewett conveys the concept of preservation of nature as synonymous with preserva-

  tion of self, even at the cost of remaining isolated from the world beyond the pine

  trees and the sea. It may be that Jewett ’ s vision of the child Sylvia as a woman is

  the fi gure of Joanna, the hermit on Shell - Heap Island in Country of the Pointed Firs .

  Jewett, like Thaxter, does not minimize the cost of Sylvia ’ s or Joanna ’ s choice. She

  ends “ A White Heron ” with a question for her readers: what is it, she asks, “ that