SOURCE: Westbrook, Perry D. “Willfulness and Wrongheadedness: The Hill People of Rose Terry Cooke,” in Acres of Flint: Sarah Orne Jewett and Her Contemporaries, revised edition, pp. 78-85. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, Westbrook discusses the comic and tragic characters created by Cooke. Where other New England writers saw the hardships of farm life resulting in tough, self-reliant individuals, Cooke believed the harsh conditions destroyed the women, both mentally and physically, and turned the men into hardened bullies.]

And how, we ask, would New England's rocky soil and icy hills have been made mines of wealth unless there had been human beings born to oppose, delighting to combat and wrestle, and with an unconquerable power of will.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People¹

1. ZEPH HIGGINS

One of the most interesting and vivid characters that Harriet Beecher Stowe created is the farmer Zeph Higgins in Poganuc People. For plain “sotness” and “cussedness” he has no equal in American literature; yet he is as natural an outcropping of the New England hills as one of the immovable boulders in his own fields. The region around Stowe's native Litchfield in western Connecticut, where the autobiographical Poganuc People has its setting, must have been heavily populated with just such gnarled and crotchety characters. Nowhere else in New England, except perhaps in the White Mountains, are there quite so many cobblestones per yard of soil or is the terrain so broken and choppy. A lesser and softer race would soon have languished in this glacier-gutted land.

But for Zeph Higgins the Litchfield hills provided a welcome means of self-expression.

Zeph had taken a thirteen-acre lot so rocky that a sheep could scare find a nibble there, had dug out and blasted and carted the rocks, wrought them into a circumambient stone fence, plowed and planted, and raised crop after crop of good rye thereon. He did it with heat, with zeal, with dogged determination; he did it all the more because neighbors said he was a fool for trying, and that he could never raise anything on the lot. There was a stern joy in his hand-to-hand fight with nature. He got his bread as Samson did his honeycomb, out of the carcass of the slain lion.²

In his obsession with rocks, Zeph resembles Ephraim Cabot in O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, though Zeph lacks Ephraim's sense of God-directed mission.

Having cleared his thirteen-acre lot, Zeph was the type to go up into Vermont and clear another farm. He would have admired Seth Hubbell and rather envied him his four-hundred-mile winter trek by ox-team from Long Island Sound to the northern Green Mountains, followed by a summer of fighting the forest with only an ax and an old hoe. Yet Zeph didn't migrate to Vermont, and for reasons too seldom taken into account in the history of American population movements. Briefly, Zeph had been a success; he didn't have to move. It is true, undoubtedly, that in every great migration of the American people a certain number have gone along for the adventure or the glory, rather than because of necessity. It is equally true that many of those who remained behind did so because they had become so well established where they were that there was no use in moving elsewhere. The old saw that “all the people of any ambition in New England moved out West” is as glib nonsense as the new saw that “American cities are populated by the refuse of Eastern Europe.” Two classes of people have always tended to refrain from migrations: the ne'er-do-wells and the extremely competent and successful. A migration is probably made up of rather average people. Only when some burning ideological issue acts as a spur does such a venture attract large numbers of highly superior persons. Thus with every movement northward or westward in American history a large number of energetic, intelligent, successful persons have been left behind as bulwarks of the civilization that all such movements are intended to produce.

When western Connecticut suddenly found itself no longer the frontier but the home country to which the memories of settlers on the Kansas plains or in the forests of Wisconsin would stray wistfully back during winter nights in sod huts and log cabins, many a farmer like Zeph Higgins found himself suddenly transformed from pioneer into yeoman, from fanatical subduer of the wilderness to dignified pillar of the established order. The new clothes often did not fit. The residue of previous migrations, these men and women were of a superior quality. They were the triumphant end-product of seven generations of natural selection in as rigorous an environment as any Darwinian jungle. To expect them suddenly to become genteel and docile burghers would be as foolish as to expect a Viking to adapt himself to Sunday-school teaching. Vast inherited energies hitherto kept in check by the hardships of wilderness life, must be channeled elsewhere; it is small wonder that the decorous rivulets of community life are sometimes glutted and overflowed by sudden outbursts of these dammed up potentialities.

In studying the New England farmer, or the American farmer anywhere, one should keep in mind that what we call crustiness, or stubbornness, or bullheadedness may often be the manifestations of a strong nature that has no adequate outlet for its resources. Such manifestations are always fascinating, and supply the theme for many a story by New England writers. Zeph Higgins having laid the Connecticut fieldstones into walls ten feet broad expends his forces in a ferocious quarrelsomeness. Not withstanding a background of two hundred years of austere meetinghouse religion, he fights with the Poganuc deacon and out of spite joins the newly founded Episcopal church, though his independent nature abhors its formalism. In a vicious controversy as to the site of the district school Zeph without waiting for a town-meeting settles the dispute by hitching up his yoke of oxen, placing the school on runners, and moving it to the spot he considered best. In the election he votes Democratic simply because his new enemies, the Congregationalists, are Federalist, though he himself was a Federalist in principles. As one of his townsmen says:

That fellow's so contrary that he hates to do the very thing he wants to, if anybody else wants him to do it. If there was any way of voting that would spite both parties and please nobody, he'd take that.³

Today, a hundred years later, every town in New England has its Zeph Higgins.

There were as many outlets as there were people of strong character. One life would be devoted to a frantic making and hoarding of money; another would be squandered in litigation over a right-of-way or a disputed boundary; another would become obsessed with religion and a selfish preoccupation with the soul and its chances of salvation; still another would be sacrificed on the altar of a monomaniacal neatness and cleanliness that consecrated the home to the broom and dust mop rather than to human lives. More often these energies would be directed into some movement or crusade. Abolition, prohibition, women's rights, prison reform were powered by the sublimated vitality of those who several generations earlier would have been Indian fighters or pioneer mothers.

Occasionally some crusty hill-farmer would continue his fight against nature even after he had conquered. In Conway, New Hampshire, where the ice age has perpetuated its memory by strewing the hills and forests with house-sized boulders, one such farmer found it impossible to terminate his lifelong feud with granite. Having reduced thirty or forty acres into tillable fields, he carved the boulders into ten and even twenty foot slabs. With these he made a fence around the family burial ground that would bid fair to outlast the pyramids. Then for his own leather and iron carcass he hewed one ponderous chunk into a sarcophagus nicely chiseled to his living measurements. This ultimate token of his enemy's subjugation he kept in a shed against the day of his death. He now lies in it as proof against time as Pharaoh himself.⁴

All over New Hampshire a generation ago one could find old men similarly skilled in the splitting of granite, their box of wedges and drills being as essential equipment to them as an ax and bucksaw. The foundations of their houses and barns are built for the ages out of eight- and ten-foot blocks; the posts of their barnyards have been excavated from the great pasture boulders. In the Cold River section on the Maine and New Hampshire border a whole house has been built of these massive slabs. Seeing it now deserted in its overgrown pasture, with the cliffs of West Royce Mountain hanging a thousand feet above it, one wonders if any one ever lived within its clammy walls. It suggest quick and certain insanity for any occupant, this Stonehenge-like monument to a weird fanaticism.

2. LIFE OF ROSE TERRY COOKE

⁵Half a generation later than Harriet Beecher Stowe another Connecticut writer, Rose Terry Cooke, found many characters like Zeph Higgins among the hills of her native state. Born on a farm six miles from Hartford, she came of a time-honored strain of Puritan stock. Her father, Henry Wadsworth Terry, who was the son of a Hartford bank president, carried back his lineage to a Wadsworth (the same from whom Longfellow descended) who had come to Cambridge in 1632 and settled in Hartford in 1636. Another ancestor is said to have stolen the Connecticut Charter and hidden it in the famous oak. Her mother, who was the daughter of John Hurlburt, the first New England shipbuilder to sail around the world, was of equally indigo blood. From her father Rose Terry Cooke acquired a love of nature and country life. From her mother, who was morbidly conscientious, she inherited a religious nature that brought about conversion at the age of sixteen and made her an ardent churchwoman for the rest of her life. When she was six years old her family moved to the eighteenth-century house of her grandmother in Hartford, and here she became an efficient housekeeper and made that contact with the past that has meant so much to most New England writers. But being of delicate health, she spent much time with her father driving and walking in the woods and fields of the beautiful Connecticut countryside. Like Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett, she developed an early and lifelong passion for flower gardening, as well as for all nature.

If Rose Terry Cooke's childhood was typical of upper-class New England, her youth and womanhood were even more so. Graduating from Hartford Female Seminary at the age of sixteen, she taught school first in Hartford and later in Burlington, New Jersey, and at one time served as governess in a clergyman's family. Later she returned home to care for her dead sister's children. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, she found time between her household duties for writing. At first her main interest was in verse—the conventional religious and sentimental verse of her day—but she wrote many stories, which were more successful than her poems. Though she was successful in selling to the best magazines—Putnam's, Graham's, the Atlantic—writing was always secondary in importance to her, her home life taking first place.

She didn't marry till she was forty-six. Her husband was an iron manufacturer, much younger than she, whom she had met in a boarding house in Boston while she was studying art there. With her husband she moved first to Winsted, Connecticut, and later to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she died in 1892.

3. COMEDY AND TRAGEDY IN THE CONNECTICUT HILLS

The bulk of Rose Terry Cooke's poetry and fiction—including her novel Steadfast—has long found its place deep in the trash bin of Victorian sentimentality. The excavation of such material would be unproductive. But scattered through her collections she has left a handful of tales that rank with the best American local-color realism and that recreate in character and setting the little corner of northwestern Connecticut that she grew up in. In modified form she has made use of Rowland Robinson's device of building stories around the same group of characters, like Deacon Flint, the storekeeper who waters his rum and sands his sugar.

Cooke is at her best as a humorist, a side of her art well illustrated by the tale of “Cal Culver and the Devil.” Cal Culver, a Yankee loafer and ne'er-do-well highly reminiscent of Stowe's Sam Lawson, marries the town shrew, Polythi Bangs of Squabble Hill, in order to have someone to do his housework after his aged mother has become bedridden. Their married life is a continual brawl. Old Mrs. Culver, having been banished to an upstairs room, finds relief from Polythi by dying. Cal, having been driven to work for Deacon Flint, decides it's time that he, too, broke away. He chooses a most ingenious means of release. There is in the town a certain Parson Robbins, who considers himself God's chief champion against the Enemy. Cal visits the parson with the story that while ploughing he has been tricked into signing his soul away to Satan, and the day of fulfilling the contract is fast approaching. Parson Robbins is so sure of his influence with God that once on a Sunday during a great drought, when he was going to pray for rain, he took his umbrella to church with him, though not a cloud could be seen in the sky. The congregation were much impressed when halfway through the service a drenching thunder-storm came up. To such a servant of the Lord, Cal Culver's little affair with the Enemy offered merely an opportunity for a bit of sparring practice.

On the date stipulated for the delivery of his soul to the Devil, Cal and the rest of the congregation are summoned to the meeting house for all-day prayer. At the entrance two blacksmiths armed with clubs stand guard against any sneak attacks. At the end of the exhortations Cal is escorted by these muscular brethren to his home, and they leave him safely inside. But an hour or two later, when Polythi returns from the village, she does not find her husband. As he is never heard of again, we are left to surmise what happened to him. The people of Basset have very definite suspicions.⁶

This and other humorous pieces are told with a skill and realism that make them valuable recordings of the lighter side of New England life. Another group are colored by a grimmer realism. Such stories as “Grit,” “Squire Paine's Conversion,” “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” and “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” deal with characters in whom the frontiersman's tenacity has been perverted into a crabbed stubbornness and setness of temperament. What Sarah Orne Jewett saw as examples of a commendable self-reliance Rose Terry Cooke saw as harmful wrongheadedness. Generations of toil on rocky New England hill farms she believed too often hardened the men and broke the women.

The story of “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” is typical of this group of stories. Freedom Wheeler, who, as the descendant of five or six generations of Connecticut farmers, is endowed with a character as inflexible as granite, marries the meek and gentle Lowly Mallory and enslaves her on his stony dairy farm. Now life on such a farm, even after it has been long established, is never a prolonged holiday. Yet it need not be a death-in-life unless the farmer chooses to make it such. Freedom Wheeler, however, chooses just that, and for the most futile reasons. His wife has borne him a healthy son, whom he named Shearjasub because the inscriptions in the family burying plot indicate that there has always been a Shearjasub Wheeler. But by the same witness, there has also always been a Freedom Wheeler. There is no question as to the name of the next child, which of course will also be a son.

Freedom is infuriated when the next two babies both turn out to be girls. He browbeats his wife worse than ever; and to his neighbors he seems to be flying in the face of Providence, which has decreed he shall have girls. Before she dies of exhaustion, however, his wife bears him two boys, each of whom is baptized on birth by the minister rushed to the scene by Freedom himself. But each boy baby, blighted by its mother's weakness, dies on the day of his birth.

Feuding in earnest against the Providence that won't give him a boy to bear his name, he immediately marries again, this time to a termagant who is more than his match. A boy is soon born, but as Freedom is sick at the time with typhus it is afflicted with the name Tyagustus, after a relative on the mother's side. Freedom's rage on recovering need not be recorded here. Later, when another son is born, he succeeds in getting him christened Freedom, but in carrying the infant back to its mother he trips and kills it outright. At last he breaks down.

With all his faults, he had a simple faith in the truths of the Bible, and a conscientious respect for ordinances; and now there fell upon him a deep conviction of heinous sin, a gloom, a despair, that amounted almost to insanity. But he asked no counsel, he implored no divine aid: with the peculiar sophistry of religious melancholy, he considered that his prayers would be an abomination to the Lord.⁷

The Assembly's Catechism, on which all his generation in New England had been brought up, proved too strong even for his flinty will. Perhaps the best excuse for that inhumane document is that it could break those who would not otherwise be broken. Gradually Freedom Wheeler mellows into a better person. But as Cooke says, “… facts are stubborn things; and if circumstances and the grace of God modify character, they do not change it.”⁸ We are therefore spared any sudden and improbable conversion on the part of Freedom Wheeler. The ending like the beginning of the story is told with a restraint difficult to maintain where it would be so easy to slip into either slapstick or sentimentality.

4. WILLFUL CELIBACY

All of Rose Terry Cooke's strong-minded characters are not like Freedom Wheeler. At times, like Sarah Orne Jewett's Almira Todd, they achieved happy and useful lives of self-sufficiency and service to their neighbors. Such is the case with the solitary old maid who gives her name to the story “Polly Mariner, Tailoress.” For years Polly had lived alone with an invalid father in the town of Taunton Hill,

from whose broad and long crest you can see more of Western Connecticut in its development of bare round hills, mulein-stalks, stones, and life-everlasting, than is good for the soul of the thrifty, or pleasant to the eyes of the discerning.⁹

When Polly is thirty-six her father dies, and the neighbors want her to give up her lonely state and live with them as a hireling. But Polly has the independence without the cantankerousness of Zeph Higgins.

“I a'n't a going into nobody's house that way. … I don't be'lieve in't. Whilst I live by myself an' take care of myself, I a'n't beholden to nobody; and I know when my work's done, and what's to pay for't. I kin sing, or laugh, or cry, or fix my hair into a cocked hat, and nobody's got right or reason to say, ‘Why do ye so?’ Fact is, I've got my liberty, 'n' I'm going to keep it: it'll be hard work p'rhaps; but it's wuth it.”¹⁰

Polly carries out her program, becoming a town institution, like the two old single women in The Pearl of Orr's Island. When a family needed a nurse, a sempstress, a watcher, or a personal adviser on anything from a cure for rheumatism to the love problems of a willful daughter, Polly was on hand. She prides herself on “speaking her mind.” For example, her outspokenness prevents a certain minister being called to the parish, because she dislikes his preaching of kindness and light. She believes a parson should preach sin and devote his efforts to warding off the wickedness that is sure to exist in people as their share of original sin.

People still urge her to come and live with them. The village Quakeress, Rachel Green, quotes the Scripture, “It is not good for man to be alone,” and adds that the same applies to women. But Polly feels that she was intended by Providence to be left by herself.

“I swan to man,” she says, “it's enough to crisp one's eyelashes to have sech pesterin' goin' on all the time. Why, in the name o' judgment, I can't be left to do what I darn please, is musical to me. Anyhow, I guess I'll do it, or I'll know why an' wherefore, as true's my name's Polly Mariner.”¹¹

Only her hired man, Israel Grubb, sees her point. “It allers seemed to me,” he says, “the foolishest thing a woman could do't hadn't got no folks, to go 'n' take 'em on.”¹²

Yet when Polly dies she admits that Quakeress Green, who is at her deathbed, was right: it is not good for one to live alone. Facing the facts of New England life more squarely than did Sarah Orne Jewett, Cooke realized the dismal plight of the tens of thousands of solitary women scattered through the countryside and the small villages. Partly out of necessity and partly as a regional state of mind celibacy had become a sort of fetish in New England. The single lives or late marriages of the women writers … were symptomatic and typical. In their works the attitude is even plainer. The thirty- or forty-year engagement, ending either in sterile marriage or the death of one of the affianced, was a popular theme for their stories. And generally, as in Sarah Orne Jewett's “A Dunnet Shepherdess” they treated the theme with sympathy and approbation. Polly Mariner's admission that her life had been wrong is unusual in New England local-color fiction of the period.

Notes

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People [Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890.] p. 95.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 98.

4. The story of this character has been known for years to the author, who lived on an adjacent farm. A more extensive account may be found in Cornelius Weygandt, New Hampshire Neighbors [New York: Henry Holt, 1937] pp. 244ff. I know of no book, however, in which the stone house described in the following paragraph is mentioned. Despite his Freudianism, Eugene O'Neill in Desire Under the Elm[s in Nine Plays New York: Liveright, 1932] has a character, Ephraim Cabot, who illustrates well the effects of granite on the personality of a New England farmer.

5. For biographical and critical material on Rose Terry Cooke see Harriet Prescott [Spofford], “Rose Terry Cooke”; Harriet Prescott Spofford, A Little Book of Friends [Boston: Little, Brown. 1917] pp. 143-56; the article on her in Notable American Women, 1607-1950 [Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington, 1884.] Bibliographies are Jean Downey, “Rose Terry Cooke: A Bibliography [Bulletin of Bibliography 21 (May-August and September-December 1955): 159-63 and 191-92]” and Susan Toth, “Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892) [American Literary Realism 1870-1910 4 (Spring 1971): 170-76]” a bibliographical essay.

6. Rose Terry Cooke, Somebody's Neighbors [Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881] pp. 153-92.

7. Ibid., p. 362.

8. Ibid., p. 351.

9. Ibid., p. 229.

10. Ibid., pp. 233-34.

11. Ibid., p. 242.

12. Ibid., p. 243.