Tainted Love: Toxic Sociability in Pointed Firs

Last week, Lee and I explored the complex power relations between narrators and their subjects. As we suggested, Sarah Orne Jewett’s lonely narrator finds a sense of power, neither by trying to shape herself or her reality in terms of normative gender performance, but instead by imposing (perhaps problematically) her own desires for the world upon Dunnet Landing. In “Hypersexuality and Power,” Zack explores the continued pervasiveness of machismo identity among Latin American males through the lens of Foucault’s “mesh of power.” While I can agree with Zack’s assertion that “our favorite womanizing narrator” Junior’s obsession with Oscar’s virginity “represent[s] a perpetuation of sexuality as power,” I suggest that this obsession speaks more directly to the inherent fragility identity categories than to aftershocks of Trujillo’s sexual terrorism. Moreover, I’m curious about his final suggestion that we might read Oscar’s attempts to conform to a hypersexualized masculine ideal as a similar source of power. Can one really argue that the performance of gender, which is part and parcel an act of survival, is also a source of power for the performing subject?

Though privileged enough to travel and write, Jewett’s narrator is always on the outside, not a permanent part of the Dunnet Landing community, and, as an unmarried woman, not truly a part of her own. Even as she flattens our sense of the locals and renders their humble community strangely idyllic, her growing sense of isolation is palpable. Her desolation crystallizes at the moment she must leave Dunnet Landing and lose her secure position. She says, “my room looked empty...I and all my belongings had died out of it...So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end” (100), thus equating the loss of an inhabitable space--a clear subject position--to her own death. Thus, Jewett’s narrator exemplifies an internalized fear of the undefined: while not forced to live in the shadow of a hyper masculine ideal, she is seen as a threat to “The Angle of the House,” the 19th century feminine ideal. In some sense then we might see the narrator (and Oscar) in terms of the human “toxic assets” Mel Chen describes in “Toxic Animacies.” As Chen suggests, part of the threat of these toxic bodies lies in the fact that no attempt at segregation “perfectly succeeds even while it is believed with all effort and investment to be effective” (281). In other words, all imposed boundaries are both permeable and highly mutable.

For the narrator, Dunnet Landing represents the ideal; locals live seemingly full lives without the pressure to conform to the heteronormative ideal. The remote seaside village appears to exist outside of the “mesh of power” that Foucault articulates. It seems clear to me that Dunnet Landing is meant to be read against the highly regulated industrial version of American life. It is a land free from literal toxins like smog and city grime, but also, more importantly free from the view that unmarried men and women are themselves “toxic assets” to a capitalist regime. Following this line of logic, it seems then that the relative toxicity of a human being is dependent upon the perceived overall toxicity of their surroundings. For Jewett, the presence of “toxic others" signals a need for greater regulation; in order to allow for idiosyncratic, unregulated personal relationships, a community must feel confident in the overall racial “purity” of its members.

In creating for her readers a utopian land whose harmony is contingent upon its homogeneity, Jewett interrogates some fictions of toxicity while perpetuating others. She creates a space for her narrator by exploring modes of affiliation outside of marriage, but seals off other inhabitable spaces by whitewashing both the past and present. In order to stabilize certain identities, she must commit violence against others.