A New Spiritual Biography: Domesticity and Sorority in the Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett

A NEW SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY: DOMESTICITY AND SORORITY IN THE FICTION OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT Melissa McFarland Pennell University of Lowell In her discussion of local color fiction, Ann Douglas observes that "the Local Colorist's imaginary territory is dominated by the laws of scarcity: the wherewithal of life has somehow been withheld ."1 The "wherewithal of life" in the economic sense had evaporated in the late nineteenth century as rural New England became increasingly removed from the mainstream development of the nation . However, the energy of the inner life that had defined New England from its beginnings remained, embedded in the ritual values of the women's community. Drawing upon and portraying the strength of this community through her emphasis on realistic details of the domestic sphere, Sarah Orne Jewett reasserts the significance of the values enacted in women's rituals. The women's community is central to Jewett's vision of an underlying realism and is reflected in what Josephine Donovan has called "the yearning . . . for a transcending community and a sense of loss at its lack" that characterizes Jewett's fiction.2 Through her short stories, Jewett endeavors to demonstrate that the power of this community, strengthened by an inner grace, is a force equal to the challenge of the decline wrought by economic failure. One means of revealing this power and the love which energizes it appears in Jewett's transformation of a literary form long familiar to New Englanders, the spiritual biography. Jewett, using elements of the domestic sphere, develops a new code for identifying signs of grace in an individual life and makes the older women of her fiction, whose age and experience have enriched their vision of individual lives, the interpreters of these life stories. The narrative pattern that Jewett develops in two of her short stories, "Miss Tempy's Watchers" and "The Passing of Sister Barsett," indicates Jewett's experimentation with a narrative form that later gives shape to The Country of the Pointed Firs, which many readers perceive as a key work in the tradition of female realism.3 From the routines that define the domestic sphere in New England, Jewett extracts patterns of behavior that become new rituals, new ways of rising above the limitations of economic and spiritual decline . She appropriates Harriet Beecher Stowe's term "faculty" to identify women marked by a special gift that elevates them above the 194Melissa McFarland Pennell general community: faculty not only signifies a woman's achievements in the domestic sphere but also serves as a sign that the completion of domestic tasks, the putting into order of her outward life, confirms the presence of order and control in her inner life as well. As the domestic sphere becomes the central arena for both spiritual experience and the development of community, Jewett acknowledges the changes that mark the domestic sphere of the post-Civil War period when the frequency of marriage as part of a New England woman 's experience diminished. To overcome feelings of isolation, the women who remain in New England after the war look to other relationships , especially to sorority, which served, according to William R. Taylor and Christopher Lasch, "as their model of the ideal society " and became "an alternative to emotional anarchy" and to spiritual disorder as well.4 In Jewett's fiction, sorority, the bonding together of women in an acknowledged sisterhood, becomes a manifestation of spiritual union and fulfillment, and it allows Jewett to shift the means of establishing the identity of women away from their relationships with men and patriarchal institutions and center it instead in ties to other women and to a female heritage and tradition. Sorority and "faculty" empower women to create stability and security in their environment and make certain women role models for others; their life stories are best revealed through a narrative form based upon spiritual biography, which attempts "not to record dramatic deeds, but to show . . . spiritual evolution."5 This form of literary expression appeals to Jewett's concern for the preservation of community, since by revealing moments of spiritual worth in an individual life, spiritual biography both informs and confirms the beliefs and values of a larger community. This...