Jewett's domestic innovations

The Country of the Pointed Firs has been frustrating to write about.  Well, I managed to drop the second “the” in the title only once, which is an achievement.  No, I mean something else, that Jewett’s novel is quite subtly written, so that whenever I move in more closely on a passage, I discover a lot of shading that I had missed.  I have been writing about the scenes in the book from too great a distance, one that misses much of the art of the novel.

Not that the detailed brushwork will make up for the lack of novelistic fun for the impatient reader who demands it.  The structure and story of The Country of the Pointed Firs are conceptual innovations that suggest new possibilities for the content and meaning if fiction, but at the same time withhold many of the usual pleasures.  As Ann Romines writes in The Home Plot: Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), the book:

lacks the pattern of complication and climax, the sense of accomplished external action, which we are accustomed to finding in nineteenth-century novels.   The events of the book occur again and again, as domestic tasks do.  (74)

One kind of intricacy is replaced with another.

Each of the two parts of Little Women features a chapter devoted to housekeeping, one in which the children must care for the house without the help of their mother, and a second in which the newly married Meg discovers the difficulties of managing a home on her own.  Both episodes are comic and pointedly aimed at a clear moral.  Alternatively, I think of Esther Summerson in Bleak House, once she is appointed head of the titular house, proudly bearing her basket of keys (I have come across a new wife doing the same thing in Buddenbrooks), with little indication of what she actually does.  Either Dickens has little idea, or he has no means to (or interest in) making art of it.  Jewett thinks, no, there is art here, too.

Later domestic writers – I barely know this tradition – find ways to work the good old novelistic stuff back into their novels, so that Delta Wedding and The Optimist’s Daughter (which, if I remember correctly, ends with a climatic bout of housecleaning), seem filled with incident and story, even if very little is actually going on.  but we are used to that now.  I wonder if the child’s point of view adds a gloss of novelty or strangeness to the domestic detail.  It certainly does in the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder, where I can share the five year-old Laura’s interest in the mechanics of making maple sugar candy even if I am not so interested.  That is a bad example, because I am interested, but the principle is sound.

Another direction is to make the book even more boring, as in a novel I have not read, Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931), about a young girl keeping her father’s house in late 17th century Quebec.  This is Romines:

In Shadows on the Rock, no detail is too small for attention; the book is full of menus, timetables, household hints, and recipes.  We even learn exactly how Cécile disposes of her kitchen garbage.  (153)

Romines calls the book “subtle and under-valued” (152).  I am curious, but I have read so little Cather.  Perhaps commenters will have other favorites from the tradition.  I have not even read Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980), so what do I know.  As I said, frustrating; ignorance is frustrating.

The history of Mrs. Tilley's best room - or, an escape from fog town

Coming early in The Country of the Pointed Firs, I wondered how Captain Littlepage’s town of fog people related to the “actual” town where the narrator, Sarah, was spending her summer.  At this point in the novel, the townsfolk might as well be made of fog.  She does not know them.  But her visit with the damaged Littlepage turns out to be her initiation.  Her neighbors begin to solidify.  Only poor Littlepage remains trapped in fog town, as we see later in the novel:

… and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window as I passed by, watching for some one who never came.  I tried to speak to him, but he did not see me.  There was a patient look on the old man's face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.   (Ch. XVI)

Most of The Country of the Pointed Firs was serialized in four parts in The Atlantic Monthly, but Jewett added a couple of chapters to the finished book, one of which is a response to the narrator’s encounter with Captain Littlepage.  Sarah has progressed so far in her understanding of the town that she is able to make her own friends and do her own visiting, even with as challenging a resident as Elijah Tilley, a widower fisherman: “You felt almost as if a landmark pine should suddenly address you in regard to the weather, or a lofty-minded old camel make a remark as you stood respectfully near him under the circus tent” (Ch. XX).

Sarah “often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fisherman.”  It turns out that this one’s inner life is mostly concerned with his dead wife and with housekeeping.  The two subjects are inextricable.  Tilley has “enshrined his wife” in his home, especially  in a “best room” that is preserved intact.  Sarah finds it a “sadder and more empty place than the kitchen,” but perhaps because she is a writer she is able to revive the dead a bit:

I could imagine the great day of certain purchases, the bewildering shops of the next large town, the aspiring anxious woman, the clumsy sea-tanned man in his best clothes, so eager to be pleased, but at ease only when they were safe back in the sailboat again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money all spent and nothing to think of but tiller and sail.  I looked at the unworn carpet, the glass vases on the mantelpiece with their prim bunches of bleached swamp grass and dusty marsh rosemary, and I could read the history of Mrs. Tilley's best room from its very beginning.

This is the second mantelpiece decorated with grass in the book.  In the earlier room, the carpet is covered with rugs to protect it from use, but here there is no use.  No one walks in this room.

At the end of the chapter, Sarah tells her friend and landlady Mrs. Todd that she has visited Tilley.  “’I expect you had kind of a dull session; he ain’t the talkin’ kind,’” is her first response, but when she is told that she is wrong, that Tilley was talking, she knows the subject (“’Then ‘t was all about his wife’”), and says that she “’don’t want to go there no more’” because it is too sad.  She misses the wife (“’there ain’t hardly a day I don’t think o’ dear Sarah Tilley’”), but I wonder if it is also too painful to watch Tilley’s struggle to evade the fog town.

Notions of Solomon's Temple and blowing gray figures - weird Jewett

Ghosts and weirdness tonight.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is now usually published with four more stories set in the same town and with the same narrator.  Three are even set during the same summer.  Two are visits, pure domestic picaresque.  One is actually a kind of wrapping up of a plot, which in the plotless context of the novel is almost like a twist ending.

The remaining story, “The Foreigner” (1900), is another surprise, since it is an almost conventional, well-made short story.  It is even a ghost story, told by one character to another on a stormy night.  The story reminds me strongly of some of Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories of female solidarity.  It even has a postcolonial angle (see title).  I wonder if it has become well-known in certain academic circles.  It seems that it should be.

But I will set the ghost story aside for something stranger.  The narrator, Sarah, has rented an abandoned schoolhouse (the Maine town has lost its children) to serve as a “room of her own” for her writing.  She has not become part of the community, so her first significant “visit” turns out to be with a visionary madman, Captain Littlepage, who tells a story that is half borrowed from Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and half from H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (which would not be published or even written for another thirty-five years).

“’A shipmaster was apt to get the habit of reading,’ said my companion,” which might explain part of the strange tale that has become an obsession for him, much like (Sebald alert!) another sea captain he knew “’had notions of Solomon's Temple, and made a very handsome little model of the same, right from the Scripture measurements’” (Ch. V).  Littlepage was once shipwrecked in the Arctic, where he met the survivor of an exploring expedition who is the source of the weird tale.  The explorer told of a hidden town inhabited by “blowing gray figures that would pass along alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if they were watching.”  When pursued they “flittered away” like “a piece of cobweb.”

Finally, the gray shapes attack:

'Those folks, or whatever they were, come about 'em like bats; all at once they raised incessant armies, and come as if to drive 'em back to sea.  They stood thick at the edge o' the water like the ridges o' grim war; no thought o' flight, none of retreat.  Sometimes a standing fight, then soaring on main wing tormented all the air.  And when they'd got the boat out o' reach o' danger, Gaffett said they looked back, and there was the town again, standing up just as they'd seen it first, comin' on the coast.'  (Ch. VI)

Does it make the passage more or less strange that much of it is taken from Book VI of Paradise Lost?  “’I was well acquainted with the works of Milton’” – the Captain had mentioned this a bit earlier for what seemed like no reason.

So the first important connection the narrator makes with the town is with a lonely madman while she is herself alone.  Things can only improve.

Castles on inaccessible crags - the view from The Country of the Pointed Firs with Buddenbrooks thrown in as a regionalist bonus

I am going to move on to curtains, but for more on pies, please visit Jam & Idleness, where I am interviewed, in a manner of speaking, while revealing as little about myself as possible.  The highlights of the interview are: 1) a legendary Dickens quotation about pie, 2) a fine joke from meine Frau, and 3) a fine joke stolen from John Malkovich’s Proust questionnaire. 

Now, curtains.  We are visiting the home of the herbalist’s mother, “one of the most adorable little old women I’ve ever encountered in any sort of book” as bibliographing wrote.  The antique but spry mother lives alone on an island with her oddball son,  while the daughter has chosen to live in town, on shore (“’I was married in this room,’ said Mrs. Todd unexpectedly”).

The narrator describes the little island house’s décor:

… the little old-fashioned best room, with its few pieces of good furniture and pictures of national interest.  The green paper curtains were stamped with conventional landscapes of a foreign order,--castles on inaccessible crags, and lovely lakes with steep wooded shores; under-foot the treasured carpet was covered thick with home-made rugs.  There were empty glass lamps and crystallized bouquets of grass and some fine shells on the narrow mantelpiece.  (Ch. VIII)

The word “crystallized” is an interesting puzzle, although the way it magically makes grass the bridge between glass and shells is clear.  But it was the curtains that caught my attention.  The narrator often describes the view of the islands, likely one of the reasons she is living in this particular town.  And of course she describes this island as part of her visit.  Later, the characters go herb gathering, which also gives them an excuse to enjoy the view, which is described using some typical indicators of the sublime:

… above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons.  It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in,--that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.

"There ain't no such view in the world, I expect," said William proudly, and I hastened to speak my heartfelt tribute of praise; it was impossible not to feel as if an untraveled boy had spoken, and yet one loved to have him value his native heath.

The “boy” is actually “elderly” and “gray-headed.”  I return to the other view that he sees every day, on the green curtains, the one taken from some Walter Scott novel.  Conventional taste side by side with the real Maine landscape.

By chance I ran into something similar in a novel contemporary with The Country of the Pointed Firs, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901).  The Buddenbrooks family have, in 1835, just bought and furnished a large home, including this showpiece:

They were sitting in the “landscape room,” on the second floor of the spacious old house on Meng Strasse…  The thick, supple wall coverings, which had been hung so that there was a gap between them and the wall, depicted extensive landscapes in the same pastel colors as the thin carpet on the floor – idyllic scenes in the style of the eighteenth century, with merry vinedressers, diligent farmers, prettily ribboned shepherdesses, who sat beside reflecting pools, holding spotless lambs in their laps or exchanging kisses with tender shepherds.  Most of these scenes were suffused with yellowish sunsets that matched the yellow upholstery of the white enameled furniture and the yellow silk of the curtains at both windows.  (I.1., tr.  John E. Woods)

I love visiting rooms like this in palaces and restored homes in Europe, since they make me happy I do not live in them.  Many of the most important scenes in the novel take place in this room, allowing Mann to insert lines like this, 250 pages later, during the reading of a will:

The painted gods atop their pedestals stood out white and proud against the sky-blue background. (V.1.)

Mannian irony, is what that is.

Both Buddenbrooks and The Country of the Pointed Firs are regionalist novels.  It is a curious pleasure to see them working some of the same ground with some of the same tools, as different as they are.

It wasn't all I expected it would be - baked goods in The Country of the Pointed Firs

I’m going straight to the pies:

Once acknowledge that an American pie is far to be preferred to its humble ancestor, the English tart, and it is joyful to be reassured at a Bowden reunion that invention has not yet failed.

This is near the end of The Country of the Pointed Firs, Chapter XIX.  The narrator, Sarah, is at her landlady’s family reunion, part of her acceptance into the community of Dunnet Landing.  The sentence is unnecessarily fussy, I admit – "once acknowledge," as if there is doubt, what nonsense, despite Pykk’s claim that “a pie is an object with gravy; a pie without gravy is the thing that appears in the world while the world is waiting for a pie with gravy to arrive; it's a stopgap.”  I believe this is the only misjudgment at Pykk.  The New England fruit pie is the greatest contribution of the United States to world cuisine that did not originate in the South, making it, overall, something like our 45th greatest contribution.

Never mind that.  Read this, this is shocking:  

Beside a delightful variety of material, the decorations went beyond all my former experience; dates and names were wrought in lines of pastry and frosting on the tops. There was even more elaborate reading matter on an excellent early-apple pie which we began to share and eat, precept upon precept. Mrs. Todd helped me generously to the whole word BOWDEN, and consumed REUNION herself, save an undecipherable fragment…

They frost their pies!  Even more amazing:  they read their pies!  And the pies are not even the most impressive pastries:

the most renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front.  It must have been baked in sections, in one of the last of the great brick ovens, and fastened together on the morning of the day.  There was a general sigh when this fell into ruin at the feast's end, and it was shared by a great part of the assembly, not without seriousness, and as if it were a pledge and token of loyalty.  I met the maker of the gingerbread house, which had called up lively remembrances of a childish story.  She had the gleaming eye of an enthusiast and a look of high ideals.

"I could just as well have made it all of frosted cake," she said, "but 'twouldn't have been the right shade; the old house, as you observe, was never painted, and I concluded that plain gingerbread would represent it best.  It wasn't all I expected it would be," she said sadly, as many an artist had said before her of his work.

Now, it is obvious that I am cheating, taking the day off, not really writing a thing, just copying huge gobs of text, but this is the finest passage in the novel and what could I do but single it out.  I mean, “not without seriousness”; “the gleaming eye of an enthusiast.”  The gingerbread house baker never appears before in the book nor is she seen again after her sublime lament, the new motto of Wuthering Expectations.  “It wasn't all I expected it would be.”  It never is.

A daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs - The Country of the Pointed Firs, domestic picaresque

Messing around  in the comments of a Jam & Idleness review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, I amused myself by calling the novel a “domestic picaresque.”  In Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes, the characters have adventures simply because they travel around.  There may be nothing more to the plot than movement and variety of experience.  The women of Cranford have adventures by moving around to each other’s houses for tea.  The adventure may consist of observing different domestic habits and eating cake.  Boy, Cranford ought to be dull.

The logical question, when inventing a new genre – based on Bing and the MLA International Bibliography, my idea is not purely original, but close – the next question is what other works belong to it.  The only title that occurred to me was Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which I had not actually read.  Now I have, and the important thing I learned from it – the most important thing I can learn from any book – is that I was right.

A narrator much like the author (I will call her Sarah) spends a long summer in a coastal town in Maine, nominally to write, but soon the visitin’ begins.  Folks come to visit Mrs. Todd, Sarah’s herbalist landlady, and Mrs. Todd takes Sarah to visit others.  What do people do on these visits?  They visit.  I am introducing my own regionalisms here, which are not necessarily those of Maine.  They visit about the news and weather and the past. 

When zhiv, several years ago, called the book a “plotless novel” but also a “modern novel,” this is what he meant.  We are now used to calling this sort of organized prose fiction a novel.

A line that runs through the book, connecting the episodes, is Sarah’s adaptation to the town, so that it is a moment of triumph when, near the end (Ch. XX), she goes visitin’ on her own.  Other unifying themes are the series of eccentric or even damaged men, mostly widowers – this one is shared by Cranford, and true Mainers might suggest that what I call eccentric is what Maine calls ordinary.

Another line is housekeeping and cooking and Mrs. Todd’s herbs, the domestic rather than picaresque side of the book, a different genre.  I found an interesting study by Ann Romines, The Home Plot: Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), which puts The Country of the Pointed Firs at the head of housekeeping fiction, as in specific works of Willa Cather (who I barely know) and Eudora Welty.  Jewett’s touch on the latter’s “family get together” novels Delta Wedding and Losing Battles was clear enough even before I got to Chapter XVIII, “The Bowden Reunion.”  Romines never mentions Gaskell, which is odd.

The genres are proliferating, which was not my point.  I guess I will spend a couple of days with the book and its “sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs” (Ch.  X).

Jewett and her narrator have a mild and pleasant sense of humor but this book is not nearly as wickedly funny as Cranford.  I will just get that out of the way here.  Jewett wrote a mild book.  It ought to be dull.