Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside with Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett

STEPHANIE C. PALMER Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside with Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett In 1869, Bret harte published "Miggles" in the Overfond Monthly. In this story, a washed-out bridge obliges stagecoach passengers and employees to spend a stormy night in the Sierra Mountain home of a former prostitute. An 1895 issue of the Atlantic Monthly included Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Life of Nancy," a story that focuses on the lifelong but intermittent friendship between a Harvard socialite and a young woman from a coastal Maine fishing-farming community. The events ofJewett's story begin when the Harvard man stays beyond the hunting and fishing season as a city boarder in the young woman's family farmhouse because his friend is nursing an ankle injury. Both local color stories bring about interactions between local and traveling characters with the literary device of a weary and unexpectedly halted traveler, a device that suggests disruption, anomaly, and something vaguely old fashioned. Despite the device's outworn feel, it is actually shorthand for a local and translocal history. By using this device, Harte and Jewett reflect on the changes in the cultures and economies of the places where they became adults and began to write. By weaving the device into their fiction in the way that they do, they work to correct some of the inaccurate and offensive stories about those places repeated by the increasingly numerous travelers, tourists and members of the travel industry moving to or through those places.1 They narrate a history that allows for sociability and tenuous respect between social groups who were often in conflict in the course of their lifetimes. Their Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 72Stephanie C. Palmer use of this device deserves a more supple reading than local color naration has typically received in literary criticism and American Studies. Early and mid twentieth-century literary historians tended to treat local color literature as a natural response to existing diversity within the United States, a passive reflection ofdifferent places, cultural groups, histories, and geographies.2 A scholar working from this assumption is unlikely to attribute any history these stories tell to an individual author 's creativity or perspicacity. Late twentieth-century writers and scholars argue that most nineteenth-century local color writers tell a version ofhistory that is in retrospect unacceptable because the writers' relatively elite backgrounds led them to be nostalgic or, worse, racist and classist.3 For example, in his introduction to an edition of Harte's stories, Wallace Stegner apologizes for the inaccuracy of Harte's depiction of the gold rush (viii-x), and in Tripmaster MonL·y (1989) Maxine Hong Kingston rejects Harte as a precursor because of Harte's racist portrayal of Ah Sin (9—10). In comparison to Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett receives critical acclaim, but usually not for the way she depicts historical change. Scholars fault her for hiding the historical presence of tourism and industrialism in Maine.4 Or they apply arguably limiting theories of history to Jewett's work. For example, Richard Brodhead and Sandra Zagarell argue that Jewett scholars should focus on her affiliation with the Northeastern cultural elite and its symbolic and material control over poorer regions and countries, because in Jewett's day this power was overwhelmingly influential in fiction and national affairs. A few scholars dispute this directive. While agreeing with Zagarell and Brodhead that Jewett privileges elite values, June Howard shows how Jewett's "A Late Supper" weaves together the nineteenthcentury ideal of hospitality with modern knowledge of the stock market . This combination of temporalities is not Jewett's naive reading of her own historical moment, argues Howard, but a sense of history as a process not so easily segmented into periods. Jacqueline Shea Murphy argues that the focus on the interests of the Northeastern elite in Jewett 's fiction wrongly assumes that this power was uncontested in Jewett 's time and continues to be so today, and she shows how Jewett's work did not prevent Abenaki Indians from telling other stories about Maine even during Jewett's lifetime. Murphy, like Patricia Nelson...