The Country of the Pointed Firs
by Sarah Orne Jewett
“I see it all now as I couldn’t when I was young.”
The Country of the Pointed Firs was first serialized in 1896 in The Atlantic Monthly and made a name of Sarah Orne Jewett, though her name was mostly relegated to literary and local (i.e.-New England) circles. Jewett’s writing method was that of the local color style–stories that directly reflected the manners, dialect, and overall sentimentality of the region in which the author lived and/or grew up in. Jewett’s ability to write in local color had such a profound impact on Willa Cather that Cather could not begin to write the stories that would ultimately become O Pioneers! and My Ántonia until she had met Jewett. (Cather and Jewett would meet and become friends until Jewett’s death in 1909.)
Pointed Firs, the first story of this collection and Jewett’s proclaimed masterpiece, takes place in the fictional Maine town of Dunnet Landing. The story revolves around the narrator, an unnamed woman who is not married, staying in Dunnet Landing for a summer so that she may have the necessary solitude required to finish her writing. The narrator lodges with Mrs. Almira Todd, a local woman whose expertise with gardening and herbal knowledge is practically unchallenged by anyone. From the outset of the story, the narrator is somewhat irritable towards the interruptions by Almira and the lack of solitude that was desired, yet, the narrator also acknowledges that she has missed seeing Dunnet Landing (“After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs..”) and eventually admits to herself that Almira and the surrounding distractions are, in fact, most welcome. This is the essence of the story: youth and age and its inertia within life set against the beautifully described Maine coast.
The theme of youth and age are grounded in pretty realistic tones. The narrator, who is young, wants to be left alone to work; the town’s inhabitants who surround her, who are all considerably older, want to be left alone or, at the very least, follow the same scripted interaction between one another (for instance, you get the feeling that Almira has the same conversations with the doctor and her mother whenever they meet). Yet, when the narrator meets and talks to everyone, an invisible door is opened. The older folks open up and tell old stories, whether it be about other people or places they have seen or been to. Pointed Firs and the short stories that accompany it are not naturally fascinating stories; you have to look a little beyond the actual words to find the heart of them.
Like Edward Hopper’s paintings that focused on Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett lays before us something we can either take to be literal (stories and sketches about people interacting in a rural, coastal shore) or as something personal, complete with our own additions and subtractions (putting ourselves in the shoes of the narrator–someone who would be annoyed by elderly locals but then succumbing to our natural curiosities and affections towards them). Edward Hopper, more than anything else, is probably the best barometer as to whether you will like this collection of short stories. If you look at a picture like this, do you see just a lighthouse and house near the ocean? Or, do you look at it and think, “How do those people live there?” “What work does the father do?” “Is it a local family that lives there, or a transplant from New York?” or do you look at it as being an almost mathematically precise picture (the distant ocean line is almost the exact horizontal midpoint of the painting, and the lighthouse is almost the exact vertical midpoint, etc.)? Additionally, you can look at this painting as a good litmus test as well because it probably will not take your mind long before wondering if the two subjects are falling out of love or just entrenched in their own separate worlds.
Jewett balances the visual surroundings like the first painting with the human element of the second painting and the result is a bit of a catch-22. If you like delving into stories with a tone of isolation and a touch of emotional repression these will all fall into line quite nicely for you. If not, these stories are probably better suited for you when you are older and the referenced quote below the picture of the cover will hold more gravity. Personally, I found Jewett’s writing style to be pleasing but the stories to be work to get through and I ultimately took a pass on reading most of the other short stories.
I guess what I am trying to say is that if you are looking for character sketches about life in Maine, look up Edward Hopper’s work instead.
