[In the following essay, Martin examines Cooke's regional short stories, claiming that her characterizations of New England farmers and their wives constitute her best work.]

Rose Terry Cooke had attended the Hartford Female Seminary, which Catherine Beecher, Harriet's sister, founded and organized on the principles she had derived from her conversion to a personal religion based on love rather than sin. There Miss Terry was influenced by the Rev. John Pierce Brace, who had been Harriet's instructor at Litchfield Academy and appears as Jonathan Rossiter in Oldtown Folks. Like Mrs. Stowe, she was, as Harriet Prescott Spofford said, “of undoubted and undiluted Puritan blood, which is to be found nowhere bluer than in Connecticut.” Like Harriet, too, her writing is governed largely by the ebb and flow of emotions long suppressed and then impulsively overflowing. She is said to have composed easily and rapidly, writing on her knee and seldom revising. “She would be,” a friend said of her, “as good a hater as lover should occasion rise, for indifference is impossible to her and all her emotions are strong ones.”¹ Swift composition under the influence of emotions is a characteristic of all regional writing. Sarah Orne Jewett, whom we shall consider shortly, was also a woman whose work was strongly determined by her emotions. Despite her reputation for careful craftsmanship she too wrote rapidly, often without revising. As early as 1873 she told Horace Scudder: “I always write impulsively—very fast and without much plan.” Later she would tell Annie Fields that she had written a story in a half-hour. “Who does it?” she asked—a question Joel Chandler Harris was also asking—“For I grow more and more sure that I don't.”² By writing impulsively, the regionalists were able to break through the later nineteenth-century backwater of genteel conventions, and in exploring directly the emotional flood which compelled them to write they produced a body of literature peculiarly free of time and place and so of continuing relevance to our age.

Subject to the various emotions that successively possessed her, Mrs. Cooke's work falls into three fairly distinct groups. She began her career with idealistically religious sketches and poems—her tales of New England Saints. Her first novel, Happy Dodd; Or, “She Hath Done What She Could” (1878), is perhaps the most interesting of her celebrations of New England Sainthood. Here she studies the figure, at once piteous and heroic—a mood Mrs. Cooke attempts again and again to evoke—of Happilonia Dodd from childhood to death. Some of the sketches in Rootbound (1885), published by the Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, are successful along similar lines: “The Deacon's Week,” for instance, relates the heroic failure of a man's attempt to live for a week as Christ would have—the theme that would, a decade later, make In His Steps a sensational best-seller. Others, the “Saint the First” and “Saint the Second” pair, “Clara's Question,” and “John Carter's Sin” describe New Englanders who become saint- or martyr-like in devoting themselves to others. Secondly, Mrs. Cooke wrote stories for children. Perhaps the best of these moralizing tales is the novel No (1886), which attempts to show boys the virtue of self-denial. In the “Preface” to this book she refers to a childhood amusement called “The Game of Human Life,” in which the players moved their pieces about a board whereon were painted the various types of humanity. The severest penalty came to the player who landed on the “Complaisant Man,” for he had to go back to the beginning. “I never understood this then,” she writes, “but I know now what it meant: the man who yields, … who cannot say ‘No!’ never succeeds, is never respected, is a failure in both worlds.”

Her third and best kind of fiction revolves about flinty New Englanders who say No! in thunder—in fire and brimstone, too—characters who refuse love, kindness, and beauty out of habit and their long, irrevocable traditions of emotional repression and psychological introspection. These are Mrs. Cooke's New England Sinners. If on the one hand she describes the saintly uses of self-denial, she knows likewise that these virtues can fritter away into mere self-will and selfishness. Her women are stunted and her men brutalized by the heritage of a Puritanism which once produced noble characters.

Mrs. Cooke's work has been unjustly ignored by historians of American literature. In the great first issue of The Atlantic in 1857, hers was the lead story; and from then until her death in 1891, she was its foremost contributor of short stories.³ More clearly and astutely than Mrs. Stowe and long before Garland or Howe, she treated the story of rural decline, the tragedies of heroic characters whose brand of heroism no longer has any function and so sours into incredible meanness. She calls such people, in the title of one of her most striking sketches, “The Sphinx's Children” (1886). This special race possesses, she says in her parable, “intellect and will” along with “hearts of flint.” Such men were needed to create and preserve moral law when the world was threatened by “rank and miasmatic civilization—its hot-beds of sin and misery—its civil corruptions and its social lies—its reeling rotten principalities—its sickly atmosphere of effeminate luxury.” The Puritans, who had to be “stony and strong,” were descendants of the pitiless sphinx; but their children—the characters of whom she writes—needed love and pity, moral relaxation. For like Parson Robbins, in “Cal Culver and the Devil,” they magnify sin—and so live lives of fear and trembling—in order that their virtue will seem to have a purpose.

Her analysis of the tragedy of New England character was shrewd and decisive, establishing the conventions to be followed by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, and even Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. In a brilliant sketch called “West Shetucket Railway,” she writes of the New Englander:

Born to an inheritance of hard labor, [and fighting] … against a climate not only rigorous but fatally changeful, a soil bitter and barren, … without any excitement to stir the half-torpid brain, without any pleasure, the New England farmer becomes in too many cases a mere creature of animal instincts …—hard, cruel, sensual, vindictive. An habitual church-goer, perhaps; but none the less thoroughly irreligious. All the keener sensitiveness of his organization blunted with over-work and under-feeling till the finer emotions of his soul dwindle and perish for want of means of expression. … And when you bring this same dreadful pressure to bear on women …—when you bring to bear on these poor weak souls, made from love and gentleness and bright outlooks, … the daily dullness of work, the brutality, stupidness, small craft, and boorish tyranny of husbands to whom they are tied beyond escape, what wonder is it that a third of all the female lunatics in our asylums are farmers' wives, and that domestic tragedies even beyond the scope of a sensation novel, occur daily in these lonely houses, far beyond human help or hope?

From her stories emerges a procession of stunted, frustrated, betrayed lives—old maids living “on a small amount of money carefully invested,” like Miss Lucinda or Miss Beulah; women growing old in their prim houses waiting for lovers to return from the West or the sea; Hetty Buels, putting on their widows' rings when at last they know their Eben Jacksons are dead; men whose obstinacy has become so strong that, like Freedom Wheeler's, it is inverted and set against Providence itself; characters like Thomas Tucker who are too honest to live; and “vine-covered and grass-strewn volcanos” like Hannah Blair, who allow their strong emotions to erupt only at the moment of death, after emotionally devastating years of suppression.⁴ Such characters are at once pitiable and noble. They believe, as one of them says in “Cal Culver and the Devil” (1881), that “energy, force, Sturm und Drang, make the world go round, not soft strokes.”

Again and again, however, to this New England degradation Mrs. Cooke says the “Paradisiac Amen,” as she calls it in “The Sphinx's Children.” Acknowledging the irrelevance—even the malevolence—of the old virtues in the circumstances she depicts, she yet seeks to retain, by reinterpreting and somewhat softening, the Puritan Ethic. In the “faithless faith” of the Puritans, she writes in “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience” (1881), lay “elements of wonderful strength. … However we may sneer at Puritanism, it had its strong virtues; and its out-growth was honesty, decency, and respect for law. A share of such virtues would be worth much to us now.” Clearly, then, Mrs. Cooke's stories are—ambivalently, but not ambiguously—all of a piece. In the one kind she writes the episodes of the Puritan Book of Saints; in the other, those of saintly virtues made diabolical by circumstance. Venerating the holy past, she yet recognizes that it is closed to the profane present. To the strong breast of the sphinx's children she seeks to graft a living heart. At the conclusion of No, Jack Boyd has an oak shield “with NO carved on it in elaborate and quaint letters.” But he has also, in the course of the book, learned how to say—the last chapter's title—Yes! to affection, kindness, and understanding. By learning about the heroic denial of the Puritan faith, one is able to make the blessed affirmation of the new dispensation.

Notes

1. Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Rose Terry Cooke” in Our Famous Women (Hartford, 1884), pp. 175, 191. The whole selection, interesting for including autobiographical material, is on pages 174 to 206.

2. Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston and New York, 1929), pp. 44, 81.

3. See Ima Honaker Heron, The Small Town in American Literature (Durham, N. C., 1939), p. 80.

4. The following stories by Mrs. Cooke are referred to: “Miss Lucinda”; “Miss Beulah's Bonnet”; “Eben Jackson”; “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” from Somebody's Neighbors; “Some Account of Thomas Tucker”; and “Too Late” from The Sphinx's Children.