The tale of Demeter and Persephone, a central myth of Victorian women's culture, is used to interpret the life and work of a 19th-century Maine writer.

The tale of Demeter and Persephone, a central myth of Victorian women's culture, is used to interpret the life and work of a 19th-century Maine writer.

In her book Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender, Margaret Roman argues that one theme colors almost every short story and novel by the turn-of-the-century American author: each person, regardless of sex, must break free of the restrictive, polar-opposite norms of behavior traditionally assigned to men and women by a patriarchal society. That society, as seen from Jewett’s perspective during the late Victorian era, was one in which a competitive, active man dominates a passive, emotional woman. Frequently referring to Jewett’s own New England upbringing at the hands of an unusually progressive father, Roman demonstrates how the writer, through her personal quest for freedom and through the various characters she created, strove to eliminate the necessity for rigid and narrowly defined male-female roles and relationships. With the details of Jewett’s free-spirited life, Roman’s book represents a solid work of literary scholarship, which traces a gender-dissolving theme throughout Jewett’s writing. Whereas previous critics have focused primarily on her best-known works, including “A White Heron,” Deephaven, A Country Doctor, and The Country of the Pointed Firs, Roman encompasses within her own discussion virtually all of the stories found in the nineteen volumes Jewett published during her lifetime. And although much recent criticism has centered around Jewett’s strong female characters, Roman is the first to explore in depth Jewett’s male characters and married couples. The book progresses through distinct phases that roughly correspond to Jewett’s psychological development as a writer. In general, the characters in her early works exhibit one of two modes of behavior. Youngsters, free as Jewett was to explore the natural world of woods and field, glimpse the possibility of escape from the confining standards that society has set, though some experience turbulent and confusing adolescences where those norms have become more pressing, more demanding. At the opposite extreme are those who have mindlessly accepted the roles in which they have been trapped since youth—greedy, selfish men, dutiful women who tend emotionally empty houses, young couples unable to communicate either between themselves or with others—in short, characters who are too alienated within their roles to function as whole human beings. On the other hand, Jewett approaches the men and women of her later works with a higher degree of optimism, in that each person is free to live according to the dictates of his or her inherent personality—each character is able to measure life from within rather than from without. This group includes the self-confident men who are not reluctant to present a nurturing side, and the warm, giving women who are unafraid of displaying a decided inner strength. As Roman summarizes, “In her writings, Jewett attempts to shift society’s focus from a grasping power over people to the personal development of each member of society.” Ahead of her time in many ways, Sarah Orne Jewett confronted the Victorian polarized gender system, presaging the modern view that men and women should be encouraged to develop along whatever paths are most comfortable and most natural for them.

A collection of eight short stories about Irish immigrants in America by a New England writer. An introduction discusses Jewett's understanding of the Irish psyche compared to the disdain for the Irish found in the work of her contemporaries, and looks at her work in the context of contemporary multicultural concerns. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literaryrealism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.

A sharply observed, affectionate, and unsentimental portrait of life in a Maine fishing village, The Country of the Pointed Firs is Sarah Orne Jewett’s most enduring work, and commonly regarded as the finest example of American regionalist literature in the nineteenth century. It was originally published in four installments of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896; this Broadview Edition is based on the Atlantic serialization and also includes the four other stories set in Dunnet Landing. The critical introduction situates the text in its historical, cultural, and literary milieu, attending to its place in Jewett’s oeuvre and in her biography. Appendices include earlier “local color” writing by Jewett and others, Jewett’s letters, and contemporary reviews of the novel.