"The Return" to Dunnet Landing

Hello all, 

The primary text I've chosen to focus on this quarter is Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs. I've selected this text specifically because, unlike many late 19^th-century American novels, I don't love it. When I first read it as an undergraduate, I found it easy to dismiss the text’s quietly subversive tone. It just doesn't have the pizazz of some of the rollicking urban novels written by Jewett's contemporaries. After rereading the novel for the second time, I can better appreciate the subtle arguments woven into the text and the controlled beauty of her prose, but I still find it difficult to define my feelings about this unique and important work. 

As Jewett writes, "The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair" (5). I'm hoping to eventually become better friends with this work, at least. 

The following portion of Alison Easton’s introduction to the 1995 Penguin edition gives a brief overview of the changing critical reception of Jewett’s work and its place within the “local-color” genre.

“The scale of the changes and their speed – a mere half-century – left many Americans dislocated and bewildered. Contemporary novels by Dreiser, Norris and Crane, such as Sister Carrie, The Octopus and Maggie, address these disturbing new conditions directly. Yet the best work of Jewett, pushed until fairly recently into a backwater reserved for nineteenth-century women writers and stigmatized as ‘local color literature’, also speaks to and for her times and challenges their vision of modernity with stories which seek to connect past with the present and a continuing, though different future. The Country of the Pointed Firs is neither a quaint literary survival of an earlier New England culture nostalgically re-created as some lost domain, nor is it testimony of a moribund and marginalized world. Jewett wants to relate New England to the rest of America, not simply set them in opposition. In subtle ways she takes up and challenges the view prevailing among the new urban middle-class who believed New England to be in irrecoverable decline, and who as a result cultivated highly romanticized collective memories of an old-fashioned participatory democracy and a lost world of neighborly small townships amid farming country” (Easton viii-ix).

For a bit more context you can visit the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project here.

I can’t wait to see everyone and get started on dissecting this interesting piece!

-Sarah