Dunnet Landing: The Old Social Network

One aspect of The Country of the Pointed Firs that makes it such and thought-provoking and challenging read is that it has neither a central narrative nor a true main character; it’s a collection of somewhat banal sketches held together by a common setting and narrator. With a few exceptions, each sketch could be its own self-contained “story-island”; their interconnectedness only becomes apparent when read quite carefully and in proper sequence. By structuring her novel as a collection of loosely connected sketches, Jewett asks us to see individuals as networks. We journey along with the narrator as she discovers that the most remote “islands,” whether literal or metaphorical, are actually simultaneously parts and wholes, autonomous and dependent.

In forcing her narrator and readers to experience this type of community in network, the novel dovetails nicely with Bruno Latour’s talk on “Actor-Network Theory.” Latour’s talk presents a social theory for understanding objects a part of networks. For Latour, networks are defined by an awareness of the “vast deployment of a [substance’s] attributes” which transform it into “what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers” (5). He argues that the digital age is changing the way we conceptualize identity; we are moving away from a sense of self defined in terms of what one is, towards an identity defined by what one has: “friends, relations, profiles” (7). Jewett’s sketches aren’t profiles in the modern sense but like their Internet counterparts, they are quite numerous, contradictory and limited in scope.

To illustrate this point, I’d like to turn your attention to the story of Poor Joanna, a sort of “nun or hermit-person,” legendary for her self-inflicted solitude (52). Joanna’s life story spans the length of three short chapters. The first two tell her tale in the form of a conversation between Mrs. Todd and her old friend Mrs. Fosdick while the third follows the narrator on a pilgrimage to Joanna’s former home and final resting place on Shell-heap Island. The reader’s awareness of Joanna as network is constructed by these three “profiles” (sketches), the last of which most fully transforms her from the solitary center of a cautionary tale into a “complex ecology,” a being that is because it has.

While looking out at the mainland from Shell-heap Island “as Joanna must have watched it many a day,” the narrator hears “a sound of distant voices; gay voices and laughter from a pleasure-boat that was going seaward full of boys and girls”(65). With its abrupt intrusion upon Joanna’s so called “shrine of solitude,” the pleasure boat seems to mark the end of the narrator’s romantic fantasy; this final “profile” paints a picture of a woman who merely choses to live alone, not a woman doomed to a life so remote that it seems to exist in a time apart. That brand of solitude, the passage seems to remind us, is the stuff of medieval legend not America at the turn of the century. These laughing passengers are just a particularly far-removed faction of the “allies, accomplices, and helpers” that constitute Joanna’s identity.

Like The Web, The Country of the Pointed Firs coerces participants/readers to see the individual and the network, the sketch and the novel, at the same time. In order to comprehend the novel as a sort of community manifesto, we have to pay close attention to the details. We, like the narrator have to incorporate ourselves into the web she’s created, to get to know each minor, idiosyncratic character like a friend. Jewett challenges us to hold many contradictory truths, miring us in her surprisingly vast network, which like any web can actually be quite attaching.

Word Count: 612