Review: The Country of the Pointed Firs

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Realism," an entry in A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia, calls the term a movement, underpinned by industrialism and free-market capitalism, one directing writers to attend to the workers, the nouveaux riches, the massive changes to society, including threats to family and community. Life in the Iron Mills, from 1861, is an obvious example of the form, with its overt portrait of the people doing the dirty work of resource extraction, stripping away their humanity for low wages, far from any real chance at dignity or happiness.

Sarah Orne Jewett's work at first seems to turn entirely away from such social reality, towards the homier world of dougnuts and herbal remedies, haddock and sitting through the winter, knitting. But gradually we begin to see that Maine is a ghostly shadow of what it once was, which must have been bustling villages that became cosmopolitan in the great days of whaling, but declined precipitously as the nineteenth century came to an end, with just aging widows and widowers left behind, turning queerly taciturn. I was reminded of a half-hearted joke from The Good Soldier, as the narrator describes one of two broken marriages in the book, "You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during all these years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the State of Maine." Mainers are apparently fully capable of isolating themselves in woods, or on islands, or even just next door, right over a low, rock wall, stubborn and silent for nearly forever. (One thinks of Elizabeth Strout, who must be of Sarah Orne Jewett's literary lineage, with her all-too-modern Mainers in Olive Kitteridge)

There is something of misguided romance in such New England austerity, and people of warmer climes can recognize something of the tension between reserve and amity they must feel in their own lives. So it is that Jewett's regionalism, or "local color", as the entry goes in Facts on File Encyclopedia of American Literature can bring a country's readers back together after civil war. Sarah Orne Jewett and Rebecca Harding Davis, New Englander and West Virginian, were also both published by The Atlantic Monthly, which hints at the great literary tradition of that journal over many generations.

We must have the dark reality of the coal and the machines, but we must also, I hope, always remember what makes life livable, in all of this mess, such as the delightful Mrs. Blackett, 86 years old, living on a tiny island community attached to the village on the shore, caring for her avoidant and delicate old son, but a perfect hostess to villagers, taking joy in others and just in being sociable:

She was a delightful little person herself, with bright eyes and an affectionate air of expectation like a child on a holiday. You felt as if Mrs. Blackett were an old and dear friend before you let go her cordial hand....It was indeed a tribute to Society to find a room set apart for her behests out there on so apparently neighborless and remote an island. Afternoon visits and evening festivals must be few in such a bleak situation at certain seasons of the year, but Mrs. Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever Society can give and take. There were those of her neighbors who never had taken the trouble to furnish a best room, but Mrs. Blackett was one who knew the uses of a parlor.

Everyone should live and grow to be such as these, like old trees with roots in the rocks, springs unto themselves, as Mrs. Todd says. (I only wish I could have shared the reading of this text with my dear old grandmother, Carroll Gene Field, and but thank goodness that through her, such old traditions of Society do pass down to me.)

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