Melancholy and Mourning in Jewett

Stephen Best’s essay, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” interrogates the recent return in cultural criticism to a melancholic relationship with the past, specifically manifesting as a desire to use a shared history of slavery to provide a way of understanding present racial injustices. According to Best, the critical tendency of late has been to use historical dispossession of slavery as way to provide a sense of racial belonging, “a way of making history for those who had lost it” (459). Best urges critics to “resist the impulse to redeem the past,” to allow for mourning instead of melancholy and “rest content with the fact that our orientation toward [the past] remains forever perverse, queer, askew” (456).

Though Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel The Country of the Pointed Firs was written over a hundred years before Best’s essay, or any of the critical or literary pieces he engages with, the text addresses similar concerns. The novel presents a model of the mourning process, a means of mourning through storytelling beginning with a “return” and ending with a “backward view.” Readers are not encouraged to build a sense of attachment to any single character; characters are quickly introduced and abandoned nearly every chapter and little time is given to lamenting their loss. Even as the narrator watches Dunett disappear into the clouds behind her, “the past is there to be appreciated as a falling away” (Best 474). In the novel, characters use the act of recounting history to cement a sense of community. The unnamed narrator, a solitary writer and outsider of Dunett Landing, facilitates these communal storytelling moments with the tacit understanding that these histories are all that this sleepy New England town has left. Best sets the state of melancholy, “persistent identification with the lost object” against the act of mourning, the “repetitive divestment of what has passed”(460). He argues that the latter is actually productive in its “capacity for dawning or awakening,” which I believe is very close to the argument presented in Jewett’s novel (460).

Couched in the description of elderly melancholic characters seems to be the desire to rebuild a sense of community in America through letting go of the recent past, particularly the casualties of the Civil War. The Country of the Pointed Firs takes place at a time when the Maine was suffering the consequences; markedly, nearly all of the characters are old and the harbor is filled with “disabled schooners”(Jewett 70). As old-timer Captain Littlepage mentions, the loss of shipping in Dunett changed the character of the town. The oldest members of Dunett, relics of the town’s more prosperous past, live in a melancholic state that seems to be disrupted only by a foreign element, the presence of an outsider ready to listen. The act of telling one’s story mitigates, at least momentarily, this pervasive sense of melancholy by allowing for action, for letting go. This storytelling process allows for a community based on exchanging information instead of on silent adherence to a shared, mythologized struggle.

The narrator facilitates the mourning process for Dunett’s most melancholic characters. She allows the ancient former sea captain, Captain Littlepage, to interrupt her solitary writing practice in order to recount an “unexpectedly dull” narrative from his younger seafaring days. She says, “a sudden sense of his suffering…came to my help and I asked to hear more…”(16). Later in the novel, she plays a similar role with the old fisherman Elijah Tilly. She listens with rapt attention as he ruminates about his late wife and his life as a fisherman. As he tells his story he attempts to complete a knitting project, but keeps dropping his stitches, which I read as a mark of melancholy, an inability to finish his yarn and let go of this particular past. By the end of their exchange, Tilly has snarled the yarn into a tangled ball, but also thrown a length of it “off at arms length as though it were a cod line” (Jewett 97). Could this be his way of “casting off” his tangled past (forgive the knitting joke), moving out of melancholy and into mourning?