Reading Without a Map: (Il)legibility in Jewett

Claire Colebrook’s essay, “The Context of Humanism” proposes a critical return to “thinking theoretically” in order to make legible a world in which records remain, but a clear sense of “original” context is lost. For Colebrook, a text’s legibility is not tied to its historical context but to something “radically unhistorical,” something that communicates across time. To read theoretically for Colebrook is to “ask not what this text means here and now, but what it could mean for any reader in any historical or cultural context” (703-4). 

I’m specifically interested in this question of legibility as it relates to the critical reception of The Country of the Pointed Firs. One could argue that what I’ve previously referred to as the text’s “subtlety” is in fact a euphemism for its inscrutability—it seems to evade reading while also encouraging it. The text’s interwoven sketch structure problematizes any attempt to try and place it snugly within any defined literary category. As critic Marjorie Pryse points out, “Jewett's resistance to traditional categories produces a salutary crisis for critic[1],” and indeed it’s critical reception has changed drastically overtime (518). Jewett’s text has been called everything from “alternative cultural vision” and proto-feminist masterpiece to white supremacist propaganda, but what is it about this text allows for such varied interpretations? Is it written in a style so context-specific that it somehow demands to be “read theoretically”?

As I’ve mentioned before, the text’s fragmented structure draws attention to itself; it bogs you down in minute details of the lives of seemingly random individuals and challenges you to discern the shape of the forest from the accumulation of the trees (Jewett repeatedly compares her characters to trees). Our tailing of the narrator seems arbitrary—she is no heroine upon which to focus our affections—and her choice interactions with other characters seem equally so. We, like the narrator, are privileged wanderers of this rustic seaside village, but we have no anchor, map or familiar structure. Like life, the text is rife with contradictions of which we expectant novel-readers must struggle to make sense. In this way, Jewett’s text actually seems to welcome critical dissidence—in its simulation of life, it acknowledges the impossibility of a single reading.

As I read this text, I feel like I’m struggling to contain it; here and there I find a foothold, but to use Colebrook’s terms, these moments where meaning travels are “radically unhistorical,” or at least less so. In short, they appeal to my humanity—my desire for connection, nourishment and stimulus—not my intimate knowledge of literary history. On the contrary, the texts singularity doesn’t allow me to fall back on familiar literary forms or contexts as a guide. Paradoxically, within her sort of a-temporal, fragmented “plot” structure, Jewett situates characters as products of a highly mythologized, whitewashed conception of the past. The narrator’s hostess, Mrs. Todd, is described as a “giant sibyl” whose herb gathering rouses a “remembrance of something in the forgotten past”(6) and the gigantic Bowden family of whom everyone in town is somehow a part, are situated as echoes of great ancestral families from the Middle Ages, “when battles and sieges and processions and feasts were familiar things (83).

This text, in its stark juxtaposition of disjointed “present” and steadfast antiquity, suggests doubts about the historicity of the recent past. In other words, Jewett’s text problematizes context; the narrator reads her present as the product of a historical context, separate from the lives of any of her possible readers. Even in Jewett’s lifetime the text was relegated to the category of “minor literature[2],” which raises the question of whether the text has always seemed inscrutable—impenetrable thus begging to be opened—and therefore remains (il)legible to her current critics.

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[1] Pryse, Marjorie, “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity". American Literature 70.3 (1998). 517-549. Web. 15 October 2013.

[2] According to Pryse, The Country of the Pointed Firs occupied the space of “minor literature” until revisionary criticism of her work appeared in the 1980’s.