"I Feared to Find Myself a Foreigner": Revisiting Regionalism in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs

STEPHANIE FOOTE "I Feared to Find Myself a Foreigner": Revisiting Regionalism in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs There is a kind of justice in the current critical rediscovery of nineteenth-century American regional fiction, especially that regional fiction written by women. Traditional critiques ofregional writing have tended to feminize and diminish this "minor" genre, appreciating its aesthetic dimensions while noting its childish, although perhaps charming, inability to fully come to terms with its contemporary conditions of mature capitalism, urban unrest, and expanding immigration and imperialism. Louis Renza has argued that in this view, "regionalism amounted to a kind of genteel evasion of realities of the more complex ifnot sordid social aspects ofAmerican society" (44). But many critics ofAmerican literature now point out that regionalism must be approached as a genre that participates in and responds to the late nineteenth-century social discourses from which it initially seems to be turning its delicate face in order to concentrate on the fading outlines oflocal villages and communities.1 Thus, even in its elaborate, and often lyrical, construction of a pristine, imaginary national past, it is a genre heavily invested in its culture's conflicted public conversations about immigration, otherness, alienation, and capitalism—all pressing social realities ordinarily traced to contemporary debates about the growth of Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 1, Summer 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-1610 38Stephanie Foote cities which seem to be threatening the pastoral region and the folk who inhabited them. Susan Gillman argues that in regional literature, "the point of constructing a more harmonious, 'imaginary' past is to look both away from and toward the disturbing present. SimilarlyJanusfaced is the category of regionalism itself, which constructs region as both separate from and engaged with nation" (115).2 Using these new readings of regionalism as a background, I want to examine how Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) engages with historical and cultural issues. Specifically, I want to look at how The Country of the Pointed Firs figures representations of the exotic and the foreign, as well as how it figures representations of the folk and the local community. I will focus in particular on the character ofthe narrator, examining how her attempts to become a real and authentic resident ofDünnet Landing are counterposed to her desire to construct its population as strange and foreign. Because this narrator/ stranger disrupts the fabric of community, even by the act of observing it, she opens up the text and the region to the pressures of the outer or other world from which she comes, and serves as a center around which the historical moment of regionalism's production and consumption can enter the text. The textual stranger in regional fiction is, like the reader, peripheral to and fascinated by the miniature of the self-contained world of the region, and can frame an observation of the "natives ," the figures of regional interest, as both exotic (tbiey represent to her a type that city folk think of as charmingly rustic) and homelike (they seem to represent the communities that urban industrialization threatens). It is important to note here that the stranger is a tourist, not an adventurer, and escapes urban life only briefly. Thus rather than discovering , this participant-observer narrator rediscovers regional figures in the leisure time that urban capital allows. The narrator ofThe Country of the Pointed Firs in particular has attained aesthetic advantages from her apparent class position, and so presents the curios of the region to us like photos, timeless artifacts for our contemplation. Ifwe focus on this framing, this inevitable setting apart that the stranger instigates , we will see that regionalism and the communities it describes are not innocent, as they initially seem. Traces ofhistory and conflict score their narrative surface. Through the narrator, we can begin to uncover the hostile conditions of the material world that regionalism willfully turns away from and yet inexorably responds to. In particular, in Sarah Revisiting Regionalism39 Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, I will look within the text at the narrator's fascination with regional characters' stories of the "other" world...