Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (review)

Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon. Edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999. 294 pp. $49.95.

At a time when many critics are taking a hard look at the profession of literary criticism, Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon offers an opportunity to reevaluate the premises that frame our interpretations. As editors Karen Kilcup and Thomas Edwards comment, Jewett criticism has long been fraught with intellectual peril. They describe four stages in the criticism—an early patronizing placement of Jewett's work in the margins of American literature, the feminist reclamation of the 1970 s and early 1980 s, an ensuing backlash that emphasized the unsavory effects of Jewett's inescapable white privilege, and the current attempt to forge a criticism independent of damnation or adulation.

Kilcup and Edwards create a thought-provoking series of connections in their arrangement of the individual essays. In a perfect demonstration of one of the volume's main arguments, these essays defy easy categorization. While they are placed in named sections ("Context: Readers and Reading"; "Contemporaries: Jewett and the Writing World"; "Conflicts: Identity and Ideology"; "Connections: Jewett's Time and Place"), the essays speak across these boundaries. Thus, Marjorie Pryse's essay on how Jewett studies might exit its "category crisis" is taken up and answered throughout the volume. As Pryse notes, Jewett's writing participates in a "fluid-permeable movement across and between borders." For Pryse, "This movement may be understood most clearly in Jewett's analysis of sexuality and the way sex and class interact to limit women's freedom" (40).

In her consideration of the reading climate, Pryse reminds readers that late-nineteenth-century "scientific" literature warned against the deleterious effects for women who stepped outside society's prescribed roles. Judith Bryant Wittenberg's essay illustrates this in its examination of the difficulties women faced when they attempted such change. Discussing Jewett's A Country Doctor in connection with three memoirs by women doctors (Harriot Hunt, Elizabeth Blackwell, Marie Zakrzewska), Wittenberg argues that even as these women contested gender prescriptions, they did "a certain amount of ideological work on behalf of the prevailing culture" (135).

Concession to convention raises the difficult question of a writer's complicity in perpetuating prejudice. Several essays confront this directly. In Mitzi Schrag's discussion of racial difference in "The Foreigner," she reminds readers how dangerous reading for whiteness can be. Similarly, Graham Frater's discussion of Jewett's fascination with cultural and genetic inheritance suggests that some projects of reconciliation in the post-Civil War United States were flawed. He discusses the uneasy rhetorical presence of Jewett's authorial asides on slavery and remarks, "There is no escape; in this context, links with the past are reminders of abuse."

Fortunately for current readers, thought-provoking approaches to Jewett do not depend on such escape. Several essays give excellent consideration to the companion or competing texts against which Jewett's writings can be read. Melissa Homestead explores contemporary pieces from the periodicals Jewett published in as well as essays about visits to authors' homes. The volume's final essay by Carol Schachinger gives an interesting reprise of such visits, crossing centuries to suggest the continued importance of an author's relation to place. Other essays also discuss the periodical literature of the day. Donna Campbell examines the waning fortunes of "local color" writing at the very moment Jewett was perfecting her art of narrative representation. Paul Petrie and Melissa Homestead consider the effect of prominent editors' advice on Jewett's style. Both give thought-provoking attention to Jewett's first person narration, as does Marcia Littenberg in her discussion of Jewett's and Celia Thaxter's revision of Transcendentalism.

Jewett often created narrators who connected author with audience, yet Ann Romines and Priscilla Leder remind us that the emerging class of "professional" authors eschewed this connection. Romines examines Willa Cather's uneasy debt to Jewett, her literary mentor, while Leder...