SOURCE: Kleitz, Katherine. “Essence of New England: The Portraits of Rose Terry Cooke.” American Transcendental Quarterly, nos. 47-48 (summer/fall 1980): 127-39.

[In the following essay, Kleitz explores Cooke's use of local features of landscape and climate as determining factors in the lives of her characters.]

In 1857, thirty-year-old Rose Terry Cooke was respected enough to be honored by an invitation to write the first short story for the inaugural issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Yet, a hundred and twenty-five years later, Cooke's work has slipped out of a canon of literature which prefers to emphasize the writings of nineteenth-century male Romantics and transcendentalists rather than those of early local-color realists, coincidentally almost all female. Few remember that during the course of her life, Cooke wrote several hundred magazine stories, the majority of them set in New England. Along with marriage tales, holiday sketches, and overtly didactic moral anecdotes primarily of sociological interest today, Cooke produced an outstanding series of New England portraits, most of which are collected in her two best volumes, appropriately named Somebody's Neighbors (1881) and The Sphinx's Children and Other People's (1886). In a leisurely, almost gossipy style, these portraits relate their subjects' entire lives, concentrating on births, deaths, and marriages in a reportorial fashion. For depth of character study and realistic portrayal of a distinctive American way of life, these stories are unequalled.

Rose Terry came from Connecticut. Born in 1827 on a farm outside Hartford, Rose was the grandchild of a congressman and a wealthy shipbuilder. Her parents, Henry Wadsworth Terry and Anne Wright Hurlbut, were distinguished more for their appreciation of life and their respectable Puritan ancestors than for any active participation in the world, since they lived rather meagrely on inherited wealth. From her father, Rose gained a knowledge and a love of nature; from her mother, she received her early training in literature and was required to study the dictionary and keep a daily journal. In 1833 Rose and her parents joined her grandmother in the beautiful old Terry house in Hartford. Here Rose amused herself writing poems and plays, attended the Hartford Female Seminary, and, after being duly converted, became a member of the Congregational church. At sixteen, the desire for both money and independence led Rose to begin teaching, first in Hartford and then for three years in Burlington, New Jersey, where she also spent a year as a governess. Fortunately, a small inheritance from an uncle enabled Rose, when she was twenty-one, to return to her family in Hartford and devote herself to writing.

Rose Terry's first love was poetry. Finding financial success difficult to achieve in this field, however, she soon turned to writing prose for magazines. Here her talent for short stories was recognized and appreciated almost immediately. Rose Terry's first story was published in Graham's Magazine when she was eighteen, and by the time she was thirty she had gained such prominence that she was an obvious choice for the new Atlantic Monthly.

Rose Terry might have been a prolific writer under any circumstances, but the volume of her work in later life seems to have been dictated largely by financial necessity. When she was forty-six, she married Rollin H. Cooke, a thirty-year-old widower with two children, and settled with him in Winsted, Connecticut. Although Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rose's gifted contemporary, claims that this union brought Cooke “almost perfect happiness,”¹ it also brought her weighty responsibilities. Rollin Cooke worked sporadically as a bank clerk, never earning much, but it was his father's financial failure which really caused his wife's difficulties. In the attempt to save her father-in-law, she lost all she had inherited and laboriously earned. Most of Cooke's children's stories and some rather sermonizing journalistic pieces were the result of the pressure for money. After publishing the two volumes mentioned earlier, Rose Terry Cooke moved with her husband to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in an unsuccessful effort to improve their finances. Cooke published in 1891 a final volume of collected stories, Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills, which reflects the shorter, more anecdotal work then in vogue. Cooke died of influenza at the age of sixty-five.

Though Cooke came from Connecticut blue blood and was raised in a Hartford mansion, her best stories do not describe a genteel world. The people about whom Cooke writes live close to the land; they are farmers, farmers' wives, country schoolteachers, visiting nurses, or general store-keepers—all inhabitants of rural New England villages. The extensive knowledge of nature which Cooke acquired as a hobby from her dilettante father gave her the insight into her country subjects necessary to write the tales which earned her living. For the strength of Cooke's work comes from the fact that her protagonists actually embody the New England landscape. Metaphorically, the subjects of Cooke's portraits grow in New England soil as flowers and trees; they seem to be literally composed of rocks, lakes, ocean waters, and even the electrically-charged air of the barren New England hills. Cooke explains the characteristics and the histories of her people by paradigmatic references to natural phenomena, thus infusing the attraction of the local countryside into some of the most brilliant and essentially indigenous art of New England.

Rose Terry Cooke had deep convictions about the importance of surroundings, particularly natural surroundings. In explaining the rural New England character, for instance, she insists,

To a person at all conversant with life in the deep country of New England, … [l]ife in lonely farms among its wild mountains, or on the bare, desolate hills that roll their sullen brown summits mile on mile through the lower tracts of this region, there is nothing more painful than the prevalence of crime and disease in these isolated homes. Born to an inheritance of hard labor, labor necessary to mere life; fighting with that most valorous instinct of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation, against a climate not only rigorous but fatally changeful, a soil bitter and barren enough to need that gold should be sewn before more than copper can be harvested, 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 akin to the beasts that perish,—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-feeding till the finer emotions of his soul dwindle and perish for want of means of expression, he revenges himself on his condition in the natural way. And when you bring this same dreadful pressure to bear on women, whose more delicate nature is proportionately more excitable, whose hearts bleed silently to the very last drop before their lips find utterance,—when you bring to bear on these poor weak souls, made for love and gentleness and bright outlooks from the daily dulness 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?²

The influence of the “deep country” of New England is de-humanizing. In effect, the inhabitants Cooke describes are no longer people: the men she literally equates with animals, and the women, having lost their hearts' blood, are like the living dead, moon-struck “lunatics.” They are all “far beyond human help or hope” because neither they nor their neighbors are primarily human any more. Of a typical farmer Cooke writes, “Rugged, stern, hard as the granite rocks beneath the sward he tilled, … he walked as they that have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, nor even human interests to cloud their awed and reverent look into the world which is to come.”³ Humanity, in Cooke's world, has metamorphosed into aspects of non-human nature: an unappealing woman becomes “the nettle whose bloom is so trivial, and its foliage so repellant”⁴; the voice of a Quaker rustles like “a south wind in early spring”⁵; and some unfortunate children “[spindle] up among the mullein-stalks of their stone-strewn pastures as gray, lank, dry, and forlorn as the mulleins themselves.”⁶ The characteristics these people share with the natural world of landscape, climate, flora, and fauna dominate their lives and personalities.

In a broader sense, it is the actual force of nature, its storms and calms, blossomings and dormancies, which controls Cooke's stories. Her characters vibrate with the influence of their physical surroundings. They “sleep in the tender shadow of the hills,”⁷ “battle with the elements,”⁸ and traditionally marry in the spring. Moreover, the structure of Cooke's stories imitates the patterns of these natural forces. The course of each life examined reflects in its placidity, violence, and variation the characteristics of that aspect of nature featured in the tale, as indicated by the figurative language.

“Doom and Dan,” for instance, one of Cooke's most dramatic stories, focuses its imagery on the active, energetic force of nature epitomized by lightning. Cooke exposes both the personality of her protagonist, Moses Dyer, and the progress of his story by the paradigmatic disposition of this force. Appropriately, Moses's life is one of sudden changes. The first sight of Nelly, his future wife, transfixes him and alters his life drastically, for he must defy his fellow Quakers to marry this outsider. This defiance is presumed, by people who are religiously-inclined, to be the cause of his “doom.” Then actual lightning enters Moses's history, controlling a sequence of disasters. Moses's house and barn are struck and burned repeatedly; his wife and child are incinerated; and he himself is paralyzed by a final flash. After the destruction of his physical world, Moses's intelligence is also struck, this time by sudden knowledge and insight: knowledge, offered by the “Dan” of the title, that Moses's farm, which he had refused to leave, is located above an iron vein, and insight into his superstitious reaction to his “doom.” Cooke explains, “He thought it was Providence, and it proved to be iron! The visitation of God had not humbled him when he accepted it as a visitation; but the facts of nature did … he had not seen for himself the open fact that electricity is not the wrath of God, but the law of nature.”⁹ Cooke finishes her “striking” story with this cathartic beam of understanding. Thus Moses's life is shaped by a series of lightning or lightning-like flashes; outside forces actively intervene to create the turning-points of his history.

Excitable forces also define the emotional character of Moses, as Cooke's vivid metaphorical language illustrates. At the beginning of the story, Cooke tells us that “under [Moses's] calm and rigid exterior lay sleeping fires ready to desolate his life”; his feelings are “like steam at high pressure” (p. 136). This steam is released initially in the form of Moses's love for his wife. Cooke uses water-imagery as the primary medium by which she conveys the force of this love:

Like a mountain torrent which the strong, sweet sun sets free from its winter prison, [Moses] swept on toward his goal [marriage] with a swiftness and power that startled all the neighborhood (p. 141). … [T]he earth might have yawned under his feet and the floods poured about him from an angry heaven, if he could clasp that slight shape close to his heart and know that it was his own in life or death.

(p. 142)

Once Moses is married, Cooke explains,

[T]he whole force of his nature, free for the first time, flowed on with abounding exultation through a land goodly as Eden. … [S]trange springs of tenderness within him … lapped [Nelly] in a care and indulgence so great and infinite in detail that she thrived as a rose does … when the spring sunshine and the fervent air at last bathe and caress it, and draw forth verdant leaves, abundant buds, and fragrant opening blossoms.

(p. 143)

Activity is the constant in these passages; Moses's feelings, likened to moving water figuratively metamorphose his wife into a flower amid rays of sunlight and “fervent air,” all versions of natural energy which “bathe” their object.

But after Nelly dies, the force of energy in Moses takes on a more ominous aspect. He becomes himself “like a black bar of thundercloud” (p. 160); the lightning which was his doom burns inside him. His “sleeping fires” no longer merely slumber but actively threaten Moses's sanity. His final burst of insight releases much of his bound energy, which in fact appears to have been his life-force. For when “old Moses Dyer” closes the tale “with a face peaceful as the autumnal skies” (p. 166), we feel not only the calm after the storm, but a prophecy of his death. In the varying forms of fire, water, and atmospheric conditions, the natural energy which shapes Moses's life and keeps him alive is paralleled in the vibrant nature-imagery by which Cooke energizes our interest.

Of equal prominence in nature, and certainly in the natural cycle of New England, is the season of inactivity resulting in (or from) stagnation or hibernation. “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” often considered Cooke's masterpiece, explores aspects of immobility both in its two main characters, the stubborn Freedom and his helpless wife Lowly, and in their lengthy, repetitive history. Cooke is at her darkling best in this tale, which Spofford describes as “full at once of a terrible pathos and a grim humor … (p. 195).” This story, in fact, seems to be representative of a view of life that is found, according to Spofford, in much of Cooke's fiction: “[S]he looks on a blacker side than many of us are quite willing to admit the existence of; but it is on this black side that she knows how to throw the irradiation of her genius, and, while bringing out the abrupt lights and darks, softening all with the divine glow of pity” (p. 188).

Certainly a black, brooding atmosphere envelops “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence.” Circumstances and will both weight the course of events in this tale, slowing it to an exhausted crawl. The very name of Freedom Wheeler is ironic, for pride and tradition bind him irrevocably to back-breaking labor on his farm and petty tyranny over his wife and family. It is the latter which finally frustrates Freedom. For Lowly does not provide him, as he assumes she will, with a living male child whom he can baptize with his own name. Unable to force either Lowly or Providence to fulfill his wish, Freedom becomes more and more fixated upon it, more and more rigid in the loveless routine of his existence, and colder and colder towards his wife. One baby after another comes into the world and dies or is rejected because it is female. Lowly, immobilized by physical and mental weakness, cannot survive her hard, wintry life, and, although a belated spell of kindness on Freedom's part gives Lowly a taste of Indian Summer before she dies, she has not the strength to do anything but gradually wither away.

Freedom's new wife, Melinda, is a counterforce to stagnation, and from the moment of her introduction the story moves more quickly. There is a brief interlude of drama; first Melinda foils Freedom when he is sick by secretly baptizing a baby son Tyagustus, and then Freedom accidentally kills a newly-baptized baby called Freedom. These traumatic experiences mark the end of Freedom's stubborn, hibernal withdrawal from human kindliness. He at last is “called out of himself,” achieving a “spring resurrection,”¹⁰ a sort of conversion to the doctrine of love and the submissive acceptance of Providence. With Freedom truly freed from the bonds of self-will, he and Melinda are finally able to produce the long-desired, new Freedom. In spite of the happy ending, the imaginative focus of the plot lingers on immobility and stagnation. We watch the separate births of ten babies, waiting for some change, while Providence refuses to provide the right baby and Freedom will not alter his determination to have a name-sake. Lowly, a born victim, cannot survive the bitter waiting, but Freedom, after the near-killing frost responsible for the accidental infanticide, belatedly thaws. He thus achieves his goal even as he passively gives it up.

The personalities of Freedom and Lowly illustrate different types of inactivity, both closely connected by Cooke to the natural world. Freedom, immobile because he is attached to an idea, is seen figuratively rooted in the ground as a hemlock, a “gnarly oak” (p. 351), and “an old and weather-beaten tree” (p. 365). To his aunt, Freedom looks like “an ill-used bull-dog” (p. 338), with his teeth dug fiercely into his obsession. Freedom is both rigidly attached and cold in his metaphorical existence as “a cherub on a tombstone” (p. 343), and he is immovable and unresponsive as “White Rock” (p. 329), or “a bowlder” (p. 327). He has, unsurprisingly, “the heart of a stone” (p. 365). What growth does appear in Freedom is of an increasingly obsessive, life-destroying kind. After each disappointment, Cooke tells us, Freedom's “heart's desire … grew up again like a pruned shrub, the stronger and sturdier for every close cutting” (p. 352)—but never any larger. Later she explains that “Freedom's strong will, sullen temper, and undisciplined character, grew up like the thorns in the parable, and choked the struggling blades of grain that never reached an ear” (pp. 361-362). In the world governed by Freedom's obstinate disposition, bushes never get bigger and healthy grain never matures.

Yet Freedom does eventually undergo a “vital change” (p. 365), put aside his fixation, and allow some sparse blossoms of human response to appear. Cooke explains, “it is much if the gnarled boughs [in Freedom's brain] put out their scanty share of verdure, if there is a blossom on a few branches, and shelter enough for a small bird's nest from sun or rain” (p. 365). “He is kinder mellerin', like a stone-apple in June” pronounces Freedom's Aunt Huldah, “… he is a-growin' soft, sure as ye live” (p. 366). Strong roots and rigid posture, reminiscent of the twisted, determined trees and rough, omnipresent boulders of New England hillsides, enable Freedom to weather the wintry freeze of his emotional growth and survive, though soggily, the thaw necessary for a “spring resurrection.”

Lowly's inactivity results from her weakness, both of body and of will. She has “no more grit'n a November chicken … she won't darst to peep nor mutter a mite” (p. 323), exclaims the ever-perceptive Aunt Huldah. Yet Cooke obviously has great sympathy for Lowly, who is surely one of the tragic farmers' wives described in the vehement passage quoted earlier. Cooke depicts Lowly's frailty with tenderness. She is described as

pale as a spring anemone, with just such faint pinkness in her lips and on her high cheek-bones as tints that pensile, egg-shaped bud, when its

                                                  “Small flower layeth
Its fairy gem beneath some giant tree.”

(p. 326)

The towering image of the tree symbolizes Freedom's domineering will, beside which his wife's spirit appears small and appropriately “lowly.” Cooke contrasts the couple further when she goes on to explain that Lowly's

simple, tender heart went out to her husband like a vine feeling after a trellis; and, even when she found it was only a bowlder that chilled and repelled her slight ardors and timid caresses, she did still what the vine does,—flung herself across and along the granite faces of the rock, and turned her trembling blossoms sunward, where life and light were free and sure.

(p. 327)

As vine or flower, Freedom's wife can barely raise herself from the surface of that land which so meagrely nourishes her.

Lowly's only strength is as “Queen Log” (p. 326). Weak and passive though she may be, Lowly avoids conflict and hopes for the sun. And there is little enough of this latter in a life which is “terrible in its stony, bloomless, oppressive reality” (p. 331). Here again Cooke suggests the rocky New England hills covered with struggling growth. When Freedom finally gives his wife a brief rest, calculated to strengthen her for all-important further child-bearing, it is too late: “Lowly's ready heart responded to sunshine as a rain-drenched bird will, preening its feathers, shaking its weary wings, welcoming the warm gladness with faint chirps and tiny brightening eyes, and then—taking flight” (p. 341). Innocent and tender, Lowly can only escape her state of suspended animation as “Queen Log,” close to the earth, by flying to the heavenly inanimation of death.

Except for one reference to Melinda as “Queen Stork” (p. 344), Cooke curiously uses no figurative language in describing this critical catalyst. For imaginatively the story is not about change; it is about lack of change—immobility, helplessness, imprisonment, attachment, stagnation, and seemingly endless hibernation. When a change does come, it is, appropriately, like “the slow, sad New-England spring, with storm and tempest [Melinda's temper], drifting snows and beating rains [Freedom's illness and depression], work[ing] its reluctant way into May” (p. 325). Spring, life, and love arrive with the baby Freedom, but it is the earlier immobility which lingers in our minds and makes this story one of Cooke's most memorable chronicles.

“Too Late,” superficially a sentimental tale, contains a powerful portrait of a woman who unites the opposing forces of energy and rigidity to create what is perhaps the most typical image of the New England character, one that is dominated by repressed passion. The narrative, reflecting the nature of these forces, lingers on the repression, with only two quick bursts of passion. Hannah Blair, the protagonist, grows up uneventfully in a house “kept in a state of spotless purity” in which the processes of “natural appetites and passions, seemed … to be carried on under protest.”¹¹ Even Hannah's courtship is uneventful. She considers a number of young men, falls in love with one, has her choice duly confirmed by her father, and makes leisurely preparations for her wedding. “Her daily duties were done with such exactness and patience,” records Cooke, “her lover's demands so coolly set aside till those duties were attended to, her face kept so calm … that, long as her mother had known her, she looked on with wonder” (p. 236).

Then, on her wedding day, Hannah dramatically receives a letter, never revealed to the reader, which causes her first outwardly passionate gesture. She locks herself in her room and refuses ever again to see Charley, her fiance, whom in fact she desperately loves. Even at this moment, Cooke tells us, Hannah is “[s]till calm,” though “inexpressibly bitter and determined” (p. 244). Sooner than the villagers can believe, Hannah's life returns to its uneventful routine. The very next Sunday she appears in church:

[A]nd though her eyes shone with keener glitter than ever … [t]here she sat … all unmoved. And at home it was the same,—utterly listless, cold, silent, she took up her life again; day by day did her weary round of household duties with the same punctilious neatness and despatch; spun and knit, and turned cheeses.

(p. 248)

In this manner, “the unrelenting days stole on” (p. 249).

Hannah eventually marries someone she does not love, calmly runs his house with technical perfection, raises a child, and orders her life in a conventional fashion. A second burst of passion, however, provides a final period to the story. Cooke explains,

Hannah Maxwell made her life a matter of business,—it had been nothing else to her for years; it was an old habit at sixty; and she was well over that age when one day Dolly, rocking her first baby to sleep, was startled to see her mother, who sat in her upright chair reading the county paper, fall quietly to the floor and lie there.

(p. 255)

Hannah has just read the news of Charley's death and at last her passion bursts out in the form of fainting, violent tears, and a confession to her daughter that “[I]t is too late!” (p. 256). The character of Hannah's story, then, alternates between the two forces which dominate her emotions. Her restrained and uneventful growing-up ends with a desperate gesture denying love. She is left with an even more restrained and uneventful adulthood, ending with a now-futile, passionate admission of love.

The dual nature of Hannah's outward life is simple, but inwardly the forces of passion and repression devastatingly co-exist. Cooke uses an unusual number of inorganic natural images to illustrate the deadening effect of Hannah's restraint. Hannah is hard; she has “iron and steel in [her] soul” (p. 232). Her eyes have a “native steely glint” (p. 241); her face has “settled into stone, into flint” (p. 241); her cheek has “the whiteness of a marble monument” (p. 241); she keeps an “iron hand” (p. 249) on her memories; and her nature is like a “rocky coast” (p. 235). She, like Freedom Wheeler, appears “as cool, as uninteresting as any cherub on a tombstone” (p. 233), a terrible image of death-in-life, an inorganic mockery of a living form. Cooke further emphasizes Hannah's coldness by references to her “blue eyes, most like ice” (p. 232), her “frost-sealed” heart (p. 252), and her “icy and irresponsive” (p. 251) treatment of her husband. Cold, rocks, and minerals, distinctive features of the New England climate and landscape, are curiously vivid as descriptive parallels to what during most of the story is a young girl's mind.

In the realm of organic imagery, Cooke explains Hannah's attraction to Charley and to us when she sympathetically describes Hannah as a flower, her habitual feminine metaphor: “She was one of those prim, old-fashioned pinks, whose cold color, formal shape, stiff growth, and dagger-shaped gray-green leaves, stamp them the quaint old-maid sisterhood of flowers, yet which hold in their hearts a breath of passionate spice” (pp. 235-236). Even as a flower, Hannah is chilly, rigid, and reminiscent of dangerous metal. Although she is “[t]all and slight as any woodland sapling” (p. 232), Cooke declares that Hannah is nevertheless inflexible, “without the native grace of a free growth” (p. 232). Moreover Hannah's hair, while being compared to a plant substance, yet takes on a hard metallic aspect as it “glitter[s] like fresh flax” (p. 233). The botanical images Cooke chooses to describe her heroine are all of unyielding beauty.

A combination of organic and inorganic natural images emphasizes Hannah's essentially double nature. “[N]o vine-planted and grass-strewn volcano ever showed more placidly than Hannah Blair” (p. 236), pronounces Cooke, here covering the geophysical force of Hannah's passion with a gentle vegetable growth of conformity. For outwardly Hannah always appears normal—normally pleasant and restrained, that is. Her closest approach to complete natural beauty occurs on her wedding day, and even then Cooke simply masks the inorganic with the organic in a passage which illustrates the importance of climate and setting in Cooke's world:

At last the last Wednesday came,—a day as serene and lovely as if new created; flying masses of white cloud chased each other through the azure sky, and cast quick shadows on the long, green range of hills that shut in Wingfield on the west. Shine and shadow added an exquisite grace of expression to the shades of tender green veiling those cruel granite rocks; a like flitting grace at last transfigured Hannah Blair's cold-featured face.

(p. 239)

After Hannah's rejection of Charley, Moll Thunder, an Indian herb-woman who appears in many of Cooke's stories, offers a description with a similar mixture of the organic and inorganic aspects of nature when she says of Hannah, “She look pretty much fine; same as cedar tree out dere, all red vine all ober; nobody tink him ole cedar been lightnin'-struck las' year. He! he! Haint got no heart in him—pretty much holler” (pp. 250-251). Hannah here masquerades organically as a tree, blasted by the electric force of her passion, and again covered by a passively pretty conformity of behavior. Cooke thus mirrors the dual nature of Hannah Blair in a series of vivid and complex images, providing a keen portrait of an almost stereotypical New England character through recognizable descriptions of the New England scene.

Although few of the natural phenomena Cooke depicts are exclusively associated with New England, yet the sum of them clearly conjures up that tormented countryside of “bare round hills, mullein-stalks, stones, and life-everlasting”¹² which permeates her imagination. But it is not only the harsh face of New England which Cooke sees. Consider, for example, her description of that “doomed” farm, located on an iron vein, which Moses Dyer refused to leave:

Pictures, indeed, were needless; the house stood on a slight rise of ground, in the midst of a green field itself high above the road through Dorset, and every window showed a landscape beyond the genius of man to reproduce. White Mountain rose fair and mighty to the east, clothed with foliage to the foot of the great limestone rock on its summit; to the north the picturesque old mill and flashing river met the eye; southward lay the lovely Dorset valley, with Equinox Mountain on the right; and westward the Ledge, an abrupt precipice fringed with cedars, hung over the placid waters of Bright Lake. What more could one ask for the delight of the eye than all this changing loveliness?¹³

The difficult climate and rocky, barren soil to which Cooke so often refers only underline the beauties of the natural topological formations and quick but luxuriant New England summer growth which are also present in Cooke's stories.

It is from her appreciative perception of these natural aspects of New England that Cooke derives her reputation as an artist—what Spofford considers “her faculty of depicting the last delicate shade and contour of the New England country life in a manner rivalled by no other delineator.”¹⁴ Recognizing the careful artistry of her characterizations, a care particularly noticeable in her nature imagery, Fred Lewis Pattee in The Development of the American Short Story considers Cooke, whose “tales mark a distinct advance in American short-story art,” a pioneer in the use of local color.¹⁵ Van Wyck Brooks, who rather insultingly credits Cooke with the establishment of “the type of rural story that other writers developed more dexterously later,” nevertheless, in New England Indian Summer 1865-1915, considers some of her stories “all but beyond comparison.”¹⁶ He then reveals the strength of Cooke's imagery by paraphrasing without acknowledgement and in another context her description of New England as full of “volcanoes, strewn with vines, [which lie] under the placid hollows of its human surface” (p. 88). Cooke's metaphor for Hannah Blair is indeed, like many of her nature images, vivid and unforgettable. For Cooke's true literary accomplishment comes from the fact that, as Sylvia Chace Lintner insists, Cooke “was the first to find the roots of her eccentric characters in the rocky, barren hills they inhabited.”¹⁷ The connection of landscape to character is the trademark of Cooke's writing.

Looking at the stories of Rose Terry Cooke, we can see that it is not only the people but their histories which exude the essence of New England. From references to universal natural forces down to images of tiny local plants and birds, Cooke controls, elucidates, and ornaments her portraits with a natural portrait of New England itself. The stories of Rose Terry Cooke are moving evocations of the character of a whole region, and for this reason they are exciting reading for any lover of New England.¹⁸

Notes

1. Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Rose Terry Cooke,” in Our Famous Women (Hartford, Connecticut: A. D. Worthington, 1884), p. 206.

2. Rose Terry Cooke, as quoted by Spofford, p. 189.

3. Rose Terry Cooke, “Some Account of Thomas Tucker,” in The Sphinx's Children and Other People's (Boston: Ticknor, 1886), p. 167.

4. Cooke, “Polly Mariner, Tailoress,” in Somebody's Neighbors (1881; rpt. New York: Garrett Press, 1969), p. 235.

5. Cooke, “Polly Mariner, Tailoress,” p. 238.

6. Cooke, “Some Account of Thomas Tucker,” p. 169.

7. Cooke, “Thomas Tucker,” p. 183.

8. Cooke, “Thomas Tucker,” p. 170.

9. Cooke, “Doom and Dan,” in The Sphinx's Children and Other People's, p. 165. Subsequent references to this story will be given by page number parenthetically within the text.

10. Cooke, “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” in Somebody's Neighbors, p. 364-365. Subsequent references to this story will be given by page number parenthetically within the text.

11. Cooke, “Too Late,” in The Sphinx's Children and Other People's, pp. 230 and 231. Subsequent references to this story will be given by page number parenthetically within the text.

12. Cooke, “Polly Mariner, Tailoress,” p. 229.

13. Cooke, “Doom and Dan,” p. 144.

14. Spofford, p. 188.

15. Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), p. 176.

16. Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), p. 86.

17. Sylvia Chace Lintner, “Rose Terry Cooke,” in Notable American Women, I, ed. Edward T. James et al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1971), p. 378.

18. Surprisingly few critical studies have focused upon Cooke. Three unpublished Ph. D. dissertations of interest are Jean Downey, “A Biographical and Critical Study of Rose Terry Cooke” (University of Ottawa, 1956); Susan Allen Toth, “More Than Local Color: A Reappraisal of Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Alice Brown” (University of Minnesota, 1969); and Rodney Lee Smith, “‘These Poor Weak Souls’: Rose Terry Cooke's Presentation of Men and Women Who Were Converts to the Social Gospel in the Gilded Age” (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1978). Toth is also the author of a bibliographic essay, “Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892),” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, 4 (1971), 170-176, and a critical essay, “Character Studies in Rose Terry Cooke: New Faces for the Short Story,” Kate Chopin Newsletter, 2 (1976), 19-26.