SOURCE: "Going in Circles: The Female Geography of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs" in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 16, Fall, 1983, pp. 83-92.

[In the following essay, Ammons discusses the narrative structure of Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs as unconventional because of its circular, nonlinear, and peculiarly feminine style.]

Sarah Orne Jewett realized very early that plot was not her strong suit. She wrote to Horace E. Scudder, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, in 1873 (Jewett was born in 1849): "But I don't believe I could write a long story as . . . you advise me in this last letter. In the first place, I have no dramatic talent. The story would have no plot. I should have to fill it out with descriptions of character and meditations. It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there never is any play!" At this early point in her career, Jewett worried about her inability to produce conventional dramatic structure. "I could write you entertaining letters perhaps, from some desirable house where I was in most charming company, but I couldn't make a story about it. I seem to get very much bewildered when I try to make these come in for secondary parts. And what shall be done with such a girl? For I wish to keep on writing, and to do the very best I can."¹

Jewett never did become skillful at conventional plotting. Her attempt to create an interesting historical novel in The Tory Lover (1901) is notably unsuccessful; her three novels for girls, while pleasant, are very ordinary. Probably because conventional, long, dramatic structures requiring exposition, complication, climax, and resolution—the standard protagonist/antagonist model—did not work well for her, she wrote few long works. The problem of how to sustain a long narrative without relying on stock dramatic architecture was not easy to solve. She could do a respectable job with conventional form if her subject matter was fairly predictable, as A Country Doctor demonstrates in 1884; but even this novel, interesting thematically, is not particularly exciting aesthetically. It remained for The Country of the Pointed Firs a dozen years later to reveal a solution to Jewett's problem of putting together a long piece of fiction that would not attempt to imitate conventional dramatic structure yet would be unified and exciting. To accomplish that end, Jewett structures the novel around two essentially female psychic patterns: one of web, the other of descent.

In In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development the developmental theorist Carol Gilligan argues that men and women value different areas of life. She says that "the vision of maturity can be seen to shift when adulthood is portrayed by women rather than men. When women construct the adult domain, the world of relationships emerges and becomes the focus of attention and concern." Basing her findings on research undertaken by others as well as herself, she comes to the conclusion that "while men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength."² She continues in a statement that might well be used to explicate the fictive world of Sarah Orne Jewett: "Women's development delineates the path not only to a less violent life but also to a maturity realized through interdependence and taking care" (Gilligan, p. 172). This less violent female orientation comes, in Gilligan's view, from the fact that female development promotes a relational over a competitive approach to life, something which has often been construed as aberrant or maladjusted by modern psychological theory because such theory is based on a male rather than a female model. For example, in the existing literature, Gilligan points out that "women appear as the exception to the rule of relationships, by demonstrating a love not admixed with anger, a love arising neither from separation nor from a feeling of being at one with the external world as a whole, but rather from a feeling of connection, a primary bond between other and self." Speaking directly to the major modern theoretical model, she explains: "Throughout Freud's work women remain the exception to his portrayal of relationships, and they sound a continuing theme, of an experience of love which, however described—as narcissistic or as hostile to civilization—does not appear to have separation and aggression at its base" (Gilligan, pp. 46-47). This specifically female experience of love described by Gilligan, an experience not grounded in separation and aggression but in connection, in feelings of intimate relatedness to others, animates The Country of the Pointed Firs. The book turns its back on the competitive world of men, literally leaving cantankerous Boston miles behind, and explores the quiet, affectional realm of women.

Jewett's structure reflects her subject matter. Rendering one woman's easy, undramatic, fundamentally unconflicted accumulation of relationships over the course of one summer—her nurturance and development of bonds with a number of other people—represents the artistic challenge of Jewett's book. The task is to keep the narrative free of conflict ("action") trumped up for its own sake, yet make it cohesive, even compelling. Jewett does that in part, I think, by structuring the book like a web.

To help us visualize male and female modes of perception, Gilligan extrapolates from her material two dominant images. "The images of hierarchy and web," she says, "drawn from the texts of men's and women's fantasies and thoughts, convey different ways of structuring relationships and are associated with different views of morality and self." They "inform different modes of assertion and response: the wish [of men] to be alone at the top and the consequent fear that others will get too close; the wish [of women] to be at the center of connection and the consequent fear of being too far out on the edge" (Gilligan, p. 62). Conventional Western written narrative such as Jewett inherited corresponds in important ways to the hierarchical mode described here by Gilligan. Created by men, standard dramatic structure is linear (starts at one point and moves forward to another point), pinnacleoriented (moves by stages or steps, often clearly identifiable, to a climactic top point); asymmetric (the high point usually occurs between the middle and the end); and relationally exclusive rather than accumulative (relationships compete with and replace each other to keep the action moving forward, as opposed to side-ways, up-anddown, backwards, or three-dimensionally). The result is narrative structure that works on a ladder principle: action and tension mount as we progress through the fiction to its climax, its high point, situated close to the end.

Jewett's structure in The Country of the Pointed Firs is, in contrast, webbed, net-worked. Instead of being linear, it is nuclear: the narrative moves out from one base to a given point and back again, out to another point, and back again, out again, back again, and so forth, like arteries on a spider's web. Instead of building to an asymmetric height, it collects weight at the middle: the most highly charged experience of the book, the visit to Green Island, comes at the center of the book (in the eighth through eleventh of twenty-one chapters), not toward the end. And instead of being relationally exclusive, it is inclusive and accumulative: relationships do not vie with but complement each other. The narrator does not go through a series of people; she adds new friendships onto her life multidirectionally.

Like a web, which consists of strands radiating from a common nucleus, The Country of the Pointed Firs begins with, constantly returns to, and ends in the relationship between the narrator and her landlady Mrs. Todd. Symbolic of that nuclear bond, which deepens and broadens but does not undergo fundamental or unexpected change—it is steady, solid, unshakable—is Mrs. Todd's house at Dunnet Landing, place of shared habitation and point of repeated return and embarkation. The events of the narrator's summer ray out from this central edifice/relationship in disparate and seemingly random directions, but they always return (until the end when the narrator heads out alone to Boston). Jewett makes the image "circle of friends" a literal, geographical reality in this book. She calls the first chapter "The Return," and the picture she gives of the narrator's coming back to Dunnet Landing after her winter's work in the city, indeed the whole concept of re-turn, of turning (a circular movement of course) back to where one has been—this circularity comprises the first "action" in the book—is structurally paradigmatic. The narrative continually turns back to where it has been, enriched by its journey out, but not needing to alter or improve upon the nucleus: the relationship between the narrator and Mrs. Todd. All that "happens" in this book is that the circle expands.

One might map Huckleberry Finn as an upside-down L: the action moves down the Ohio and then the Mississippi. A map of The Sun Also Rises might look like a pendulum, with a line starting in Paris, running down into Spain, and then back up to Paris. A map of "plot" in The Country of the Pointed Firs might look, in contrast, scattered and indecisive. Instead of one line, even an extremely complicated one (as would have to be the case for most novels, of course), it would need many lines raying out, some straight, some crooked, some looped, from the Dunnet Landing heart of the book. (This seeming disorder may explain how Willa Cather was led to ruin the book structurally when she edited its reissue in 1925 and stuck in Dunnet Landing stories not contained in Jewett's original 1896 version.³) The central principle of Jewett's narrative, very much like the web Gilligan identifies as basic to female relational experience, is aggregation. Experiences accumulate in many directions.

First the narrator renews her bond with the land and meets Mrs. Todd. (Chapter 1 is "The Return," Chapter 2, "Mrs. Todd.") Then the narrator heads inland from their shared home to a vacant schoolhouse where she strikes up a friendship with Captain Littlepage, a retired mariner with whom she journeys out on yet another voyage, this one in imagination rather than fact, as he tells her about a kingdom of the dead—of eerie "fog-people"—encountered by sailors in the frozen north years ago. This relationship with Captain Littlepage and his strange tale of a ghastly arctic purgatory she then carries back with her to Mrs. Todd. The next unit of narrative (four chapters long in contrast to two for the Littlepage yarn) follows Almira Todd and the narrator out to Green Island, the home of Mrs. Todd's mother, Mrs. Blackett. Within this bigger trip out from land is a smaller one out from Mrs. Blackett's earthy home to a sacred grove, virtually a shrine, where the intimacy between the narrator and Mrs. Todd deepens. The experience is carried back by both women, first to Mrs. Blackett's home, then to their own on the mainland. For the fourth cluster of chapters (twelve through fifteen) Susan Fosdick arrives as a houseguest at Dunnet Landing: the circle of two women expands to three and then in spirit to four as the country women recreate narratively the bleak world of Joanna Todd, who years ago turned Shell-Heap Island into a hermitage when disappointed in love. The penultimate narrative unit, which like the Green Island trip is four chapters long (and of symmetrical weight thematically as well), shows Mrs. Todd and the narrator journeying out once again from Dunnet Landing, this time inland and with Mrs. Blackett enlarging the circle, to attend the Bowden family reunion, a ritualistic pulling together of a large but scattered family circle. The last person added to the narrator's summer is Elijah Tilley, a forlorn widower whose grief for his lost mate does not diminish with time. Following that chapter (the 20th) is the narrator's leavetaking, appropriately titled in this book of journeying forth and carrying back "The Backward View."

Jewett's separate narrative units do not lead inexorably one to the next. They could be scrambled—the Green Island chapters could be switched with the Bowden reunion section, for example, or the Elijah Tilley meeting with the Captain Littlepage one, and so forth—and the book would not disintegrate. The composition of Jewett's narrative, like the composition of the women's days she chronicles, does not follow an inviolable order.⁴ Our understanding of each event is not built on our knowledge of what preceded it; the narrative does not stairstep. Yet there is a pattern. Although the book's pieces could be rearranged without plunging the whole into chaos (something one could never do to a well-constructed linearly plotted fiction), one would not want to rearrange them. The Country of the Pointed Firs is not aimless. The pattern Jewett creates has its own coherence, its own rhythm, its own emotional and intellectual logic.

Most obvious, for example, is the book's alternation of joyful and sorrowful episodes: we first meet robust Mrs. Todd, then sad Captain Littlepage, then lively Mrs. Blackett, then tragic Joanna, then delighted Bowden reunioners, then tearful Elijah Tilley. Certainly this pattern of affirmation and depression, of happiness and sadness constantly exchanging places, mirrors the reality of many people's, but especially women's, lives. If relationships are the focus rather than the background of one's world, as has traditionally been the situation of women,⁵ one inevitable rhythm (since we are mortal and sentient) is constant oscillation between vitality and morbidity, happiness and sadness, life and death, addition and loss. The rocking structure of Jewett's narrative echoes, beautifully, many women's domestic, affectional experience.

A second large pattern noticeable in The Country of the Pointed Firs is the way the male figures (Captain Littlepage, William Blackett, Elijah Tilley) move in and out of the narrative singularly. Whereas women function in groups—the narrator, Mrs. Todd, and Mrs. Blackett visit on Green Island and later travel together to the reunion; the narrator, Mrs. Todd, and Susan Fosdick visit for days and talk at length about Joanna—the men in the book show up solitarily. Captain Littlepage wanders alone into the schoolhouse where the narrator sits trying to write; William is so shy that at first he hides from the narrator when she visits Green Island (and he does not come along to the reunion even though his mother and sister wish he had); Elijah Tilley is not at all outgoing—he normally communicates only with three other people and "appeared to regard a stranger with scornful indifference."⁶ The widely spaced introduction of these men, each separate from the other and each surrounded by narrative in which women relate warmly and easily with one another, calls attention to the gap between the world of women and the world of men in this book. In part, as critics have pointed out, the small number and isolation of men in The Country of the Pointed Firs are realistic; the great seafaring days are gone and with them the men who made their living from ships. But Jewett's presentation of men individually and as outsiders is not merely economic in The Country of the Pointed Firs. From the perspective of female community, which is the perspective of this book, men are minor characters. They are not as a group of major importance in women's psychological reality. They appear and disappear as individuals, passing through women's emotional life intermittently and singly. Only occasionally is one essential in certain women's relational life, as William is in his mother's and sister's (but not, it should be noticed, in the narrator's, although she is very close to both women in his family). The affectional world of women, this book shows structurally as well as thematically, resides mainly in bonds with other women.⁷ Men are quite literally isolated, relatively unimportant presences.

Undergirding these large designs, much as the radial lines of a spider's structure support various surface networks, is Jewett's fundamental pattern of web, which enables her to create an ordered and emotionally satisfying long narrative without relying on conventional "plot" to give the book shape. Web holds the book together both mechanically and psychically. Mechanically, the repeated trips back to Dunnet Landing create cohesion by tying the separate strands of narrative to one unifying point, home. Psychically, the aggregative structure of Jewett's narrative reproduces female relational reality. Neither linear nor exclusive, that reality consists in a process of valuing relationships above other goals in life (notice how the narrator's work—she is a writer—degenerates almost into oblivion over the summer) and of developing friendships in an interconnected pattern that has at its core the powerful mythic energy of primal female love. That myth, I now wish to suggest, generates Jewett's other major structuring device, allowing her to move the book beyond coherence to drama, still without drawing on the aggression-based protagonist/antagonist model of conventional male plot structure.

If Willa Cather mangled the general structure of Jewett's book, adding chapters where none were wanted, she certainly did not mistake the book's controlling energy. Introducing the 1925 edition, she begins her concluding paragraph: "If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, 'The Scarlet Letter,' 'Huckleberry Finn,' and The Country of the Pointed Firs.'"⁸ The grouping is not as eccentric as it may look. Although these three books differ in many ways, they share an essential similarity. At the emotional center of each stands not an individual but a relationship, a couple: Hester and Dimmesdale, Huck and Jim, the narrator and Mrs. Todd. Moreover, each is a love story, though none conventional. The standard man/woman/marriage love-plot is replaced with a narrative about a passionate bond between two people whose relationship falls outside that narrow frame.

Jewett makes the dramatic center of The Country of the Pointed Firs unmistakable. In the tenth of her twenty-one chapters, titled "Where Pennyroyal Grew," the narrator and Mrs. Todd descend together into a silent, sacred, lush, female space in nature where past and present, self and other, myth and reality merge. In journeying "down to the pennyroyal plot," a place Mrs. Todd explicitly calls "sainted," the two women leave behind "the plain every-day world" (78, 77) to come together in the presence of the sacred earth, the healing Mother, herself. As Marjorie Pryse says in an excellent Introduction to a recent edition of the book, "it is clear that Mrs. Todd, in her role as guide, herbalist, and priestess, is here helping her summer visitor to go directly to the source of all vision and inspiration."⁹ That source is primal, archetypal female love.

Christine Downing in The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine speaks poetically of the Great Mother, Gaia, grandmother and great-grandmother to Demeter, Hera, Hestia, Athene, and Artemis, as "the mother of the beginning. . . . She is the mother who is there before time .. . a mother from whom we are not separated, as in time, in consciousness, we find ourselves to be separated from the mother of the present. She is a fantasy creature behind the personal mother, construed of memory and longing, who exists only in the imagination, in myth, archetypally—who is never identical with the personal mother." Although this figure "is there from the beginning," Downing points out that "our discovery of her is always a return, a re-cognition."¹⁰ Most often this re-turn, or re-cognition, occurs in nature. It comes about by journeying into the earth: giver of life and death, progenitor of us all, symbol of the Great Mother. For Downing the descent occurred at Delphi in the company of a beloved woman friend. As the two women sat together in a pine grove, she "never had such a sense of a deep communion with another human being. It seemed to me as though my soul entered her body as hers had entered mine." Years later, Downing learned that before the grove at Delphi had been dedicated to Apollo it had been Gaia's. The communion she and her friend experienced was not apollonian but primal and female; it was the mysterious energy of the Great Mother.¹¹

This descent into a sacred female space in nature, a grove, a cave,¹² is of course retold not invented by Downing. Jewett's own feelings for Greece, with its "blinding light" over a sea "dazzling and rimmed by far-off islands and mountains to the south," and her intense attraction to myth and to ritual—for example, "the Bacchic Dance"—she described in a letter to a woman friend in 1900 as "too much for a plain heart to bear."¹³ It is the journey Thea Kronborg takes in Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915) when she descends into the canyon of her spiritual forebears, Native American mothers and artists, and finds her creative strength reborn. Likewise, it is the journey the narrator and Mrs. Todd take to the sacred plot of pennyroyal on Green Island at the center of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs. Mrs. Todd shows the narrator a treasured picture of her mother and then bares her feelings, taking the narrator into her most intimate confidence. In so doing Almira Todd evokes the ancient, perhaps timeless, grief and courage of all women: "She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. . . . An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs" (78). Her "favorite," not surprisingly, is pennyroyal (211).

Pennyroyal is the special herb of women, specifically of womb. It is used in childbirth to promote the expulsion of the placenta; it is also an emmenagogue, an agent used to induce or increase menstrual flow.¹⁴ Thus associated with both the beginning and the end of new life, pennyroyal suggests maternal power itself: the central awesome power of women, like the Earth, to give or not to give life.

Home of "such pennyroyal as the rest of the world could not provide" (76), the place to which Jewett's two women descend marks the sacred female center of The Country of the Pointed Firs. The narrator says "I felt that we were friends now since she had brought me to this place" (77). Here the two women know each other fully. They enter into a communion with each other and with the earth that can only be expressed ritualistically: "There was a fine fragrance in the air as we gathered it [the pennyroyal] sprig by sprig and stepped along carefully, and Mrs. Todd pressed her aromatic nosegay between her hands and offered it to me again and again" (76).

Lush, secret, and earthily female, the space to which Jewett's women descend at the middle of The Country of the Pointed Firs represents the dramatic core of Jewett's narrative, which instead of being climactic might be described as concentric, even vortical. The emotional energy of the book collects most intensely in Chapter 10, "Where Pennyroyal Grew," from which, in every direction, like rings spreading out when a stone is dropped in a pool, emanates Jewett's drama of female love, which is noncombative and nonlinear. Just as Dunnet Landing, point of constant egress and return, holds the book together mechanically, and the similarly weblike pattern of building relationships out from that base gives the book psychic coherence, so "Where Pennyroyal Grew," in its reproduction of basic female mythic material, holds the book together dramatically and emotionally. At the center, rather than near the end, Jewett's love-story grows most concentrated, and nothing on either side of this midpoint significantly diminishes, conflicts with, or changes that basic female drama.

The artistic geography of The Country of the Pointed Firs, a book, as its title signals, about geography, is complex. Instead of relying on conventional inherited forms, at which she was not very good anyway, Jewett made a book that locates itself formally outside the masculine mainstream. Patterns of concentricity, net-work, web, and oscillation mold a narrative that does not know how to march and scale. Rather, it rocks, circles, ebbs, and swells. That Jewett never mastered conventional form was no loss at all.

¹ Richard Cary, ed., Sarah Orne Jewett Letters (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1967), p. 29.

² Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 167-68.

³ See Willa Cather, ed., The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925). For the thought that Cather was probably just following the lead of Jewett's publishers, who added stories to posthumous editions of the book (1910, 1919), see Francis Fike, "An Interpretation of Pointed Firs," Appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett: Twentynine Interpretive Essays, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1973), p. 179, n. 2; rpt. from New England Quarterly, 34 (December 1961), 478-9. Happily, Jewett's original version of The Country of the Pointed Firs is now available in a 1981 Norton paperback edited by Mary Ellen Chase.

⁴ As sociologist Nancy Chodorow observes of the domestic activities of women, they "have a nonbounded quality. They consist, as countless housewives can attest and as women poets, novelists, and feminist theorists have described, of diffuse obligations." Therefore, in contrast to "work in the labor force—'men's work'—[which] is likely to be contractual, to be more specifically delimited, and to contain a notion of defined progression and product," "the work of maintenance and reproduction [in the home] is characterized by its repetitive and routine continuity, and does not involve specified sequence or progression." See Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), p. 179.

⁵ As Chodorow states succinctly: "women's work is 'emotion work'" (Reproduction of Mothering, p. 178).

⁶ Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), p. 186. References in the text are to this edition.

⁷ For discussion of female friendship in the nineteenth century from an historical perspective, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's groundbreaking essay, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (Autumn, 1975), 1-30.

⁸ Cather, "Preface," Best Stories, p. xviii.

⁹ Marjorie Pryse, "Introduction to the Norton Edition," The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Mary Ellen Chase (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. xv.

¹⁰ Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1981), p. 135.

¹¹Ibid., p. 143.

¹² For description of a modern and very personal experience, see Downing, pp. 144-45.

¹³ Annie Fields, ed., Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp. 172-73.

¹⁴ Emrika Padus, Woman's Encyclopedia of Health and Natural Healing (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1981), pp. 292, 299, 302.